Why 15% of home decisions fall apart at the last step
PropEnabler.AI · 27 October 2026
Buyers choose a home on what they can see: the amenities, the price, the commute, the school down the road. Then, when they are nearly decided, the documents arrive. A lawyer reads the title. An engineer reads the plans. In our experience at Octopus Estates, about 15% of decisions are flipped at that point: a deal that looked done either dies or moves to another project.
That last step is the legal and technical check: legal due diligence (LDD) and technical due diligence (TDD). This post explains what it covers, why it fails so late, and how GroundTruth brings it forward.
What the last step checks
| Legal due diligence (LDD) | Technical due diligence (TDD) |
|---|---|
| Title chain going back 30 years | Approved plan against what is actually built |
| Encumbrance certificate: loans or claims on the land | Statutory NOCs: fire, airport height, water, power, pollution |
| Khata and land conversion from agricultural use | Commencement and occupancy certificates |
| Joint development and power-of-attorney deeds | Quarterly construction progress filed with RERA |
| Plan sanction and approvals | Lake and storm-water drain buffers |
| Litigation, RERA complaints and orders | Flood exposure and structural quality |
Any one of these can stop a sale. A missing occupancy certificate can block a home loan. A project inside a lake buffer zone can face demolition orders. A break in the title chain can leave the buyer owning less than they paid for.
Why it fails so late
The documents come last. Buyers ask about the clubhouse on the first visit and about the encumbrance certificate only after they have chosen.
The records are hard to read. Karnataka's land records are in Kannada, often scanned, sometimes handwritten. Reading them takes a specialist and days, not minutes.
Nobody owns the check until the end. The realtor sells, the buyer's lawyer checks, the bank checks again. By the time a problem surfaces, the buyer has spent weeks and the realtor has lost the deal.
How GroundTruth brings it forward
It is part of the score from day one. Every project on the GroundTruth map carries a legal and technical risk score next to its prop score. The decision score is 85% prop score and 15% legal and technical risk, matching how often decisions flip at the last step.
A red flag is never averaged away. A great clubhouse cannot make up for a defective title. A red flag is shown on its own and pushes the project to the bottom of the list, whatever its other scores.
Unchecked never means passed. Each project has 12 checks. Each is a pass, a caution, a red flag or not checked, and the card says how many of the 12 have actually run.
Checked once, reused for every unit. A project's title and approvals are the same for every flat in it, so the check is done once per project and reused for every buyer.
What the map shows today
The map runs the checks it can from free public data, across 255 Bengaluru projects:
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| Pin within 200 m of a lake (0.5 hectares or more) | 37 projects flagged to verify on the survey map |
| High-tension power line within 50 m | 5 projects flagged |
| Airport height zone | 125 projects need a height clearance check |
| RERA registration ID found | 159 projects; 93 to confirm on the portal |
| Occupancy certificate | 135 under construction, still ahead |
No project shows a red flag yet, and that is deliberate. A listing pin can be tens of metres off, so a map alone only raises a caution. A red flag needs the documents.
The documents are next
We have started with five Bengaluru projects: one handed over, one under construction and three registered between 2017 and 2020. All of their Karnataka RERA records are collected: 694 documents and 9,538 pages in English and Kannada. Our reading pipeline now gets 72% of facts right on the hardest scanned pages, up from 12%. The first full reports go to a lawyer for review before any buyer sees one. Birla Trimaya, a 52-acre township near the airport, is the sixth project in the pilot; its documents are being collected now.
What we do not claim yet. The 15% figure is our estimate from Octopus Estates deals, and we are measuring it properly with our first realtors. Most cards today run only 1 to 5 of the 12 checks. A clean map check is not a clean title; it tells the realtor which questions to ask first.
The aim is simple: the realtor should know about the problem before the client does, not after.