Bought a flat in a stressed real estate project? Here’s how long you've to wait

livemint.com:

₹76 lakh in the erstwhile Amrapali Group’s ‘HeartBeat City’ township in Noida. Parashar was supposed to get possession of his home in 2014 but the project stalled in 2013. In 2019, just before the pandemic, state-owned construction corporation NBCC (India) Ltd was appointed by the Supreme Court to take over the task of completing 24 projects of the group and eventually commenced the job.

Parashar, who has been living on rent in Noida all these years, now says he could receive possession of his apartment by December. “We expect a few months of delay, so the December deadline may not be met. Even then, at least we can see that the project is nearing completion," he said, anticipating a happy ending to his tale.

Parashar’s apartment is one of 38,000 residential units that NBCC had undertaken to complete. So far, 21,000 flats have been completed and the handover process is currently ongoing. The state-owned enterprise hopes to complete the remaining 17,000 apartments by March 2025.

While this is a positive development, in the overall stressed project scenario, where resolution and execution have been the biggest roadblocks, NBCC’s handling of Amrapali’s portfolio is the exception, alongside some pockets of renewed development. The stressed project landscape otherwise looks very rocky. In 2023, the Indian Banks’ Association (IBA) estimated that 412,000 stressed residential units, involving ₹4.08 trillion, have been impacted by stalled real estate projects.

More than half—about 240,000—of these units are in the National Capital Region (NCR). Over 100,000 units are in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), followed by Pune, Bengaluru and other metro cities. To be sure, the overall real estate market has seen a sharp turnaround