Real estate sector plays a catalytic role in fulfilling the needs and demand for housing and infrastructure in the country and is an important pillar of the economy. While this sector has grown significantly in recent years, it has been largely unregulated, with absence of professionalism and standardisation and lack of adequate consumer protection. It has no sectoral regulator like there are for other specific sectors like insurance, telecom, stock markets etc. History is witness to the fact that whenever sectoral regulators like SEBI, IRDAI, TRAI etc have been formed, they have helped in deepening the market and made it more robust. Though the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 is available as a forum to the buyers in the real estate market, the recourse is only curative and is not adequate to address all the concerns of buyers and promoters in that sector. The lack of standardisation has been a constraint to the healthy and orderly growth of industry. Therefore, since more than a decade the need for regulating the sector was being emphasised in various forums.

In view of the above, Parliament enacted the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 which aims at protecting the rights and interests of consumers and promotion of uniformity and standardization of business practices and transactions in the real estate sector. It attempts to balance the interests of consumers and promoters by imposing certain responsibilities on both. It seeks to establish symmetry of information between the promoter and purchaser, transparency of contractual conditions, set minimum standards of accountability and a fast-track dispute resolution mechanism