I am buying a liability — Agreement of Sale — Part 2
As the title says, this is a part 2 of the story of me getting the agreement of sale executed for the property (liability) I am purchasing. So if you haven’t checked the part 1, I suggest you check that first. Quick link. 👇
Now, let’s proceed with the other research that I did for getting Agreement of Sale executed and what was the whole process like.
This is same as Registry?
The process of Registry is technically getting any document officially registered at the Registrar’s office. That means the government will stamp the document and it will be officiated in Government records. In my case, they scanned the documents and uploaded to their servers to their records.
In India, getting a Registry done for a property is often referred to as the process of getting the Sale Deed registered at the registrar’s office. But it’s not always the case. Any document can be registered and the process will be called registry.
Getting Agreement of Sale registered is the first registry I had to get done. Now after I have made the payments to the builder and the builder has constructed the property, then I will have to come to this same office again and this time get the Sale Deed registered. Sale deed is the document saying that the seller no longer holds the right to the property and I am the owner of that property. This can also be referred to as Transfer of Ownserhip for Immovable Asset.
So, this is the process of registry only, but not same as the registry of the Sale deed. This is a separate document that needs to be registered in the registrar’s office. In my case, that was the office of a sub-registrar, but it’s the same thing. Depending on the Location of the property and under what registrar or sub registrar that property is located.
The process
The process is quite simple actually. There are not much steps but obviously needs a lot of waiting and some miscellenous expenses. Now for me, the builder suggested to connect with a Consultants which will get the work done and I won’t have to worry about anything and they were charging roughly ₹ 25,000 to ₹30,000 which included the 0.1% payable towards the stamp duty. But I wanted to do this whole process on my own. Not to skip the middleman but to actually get to know the whole process and have the feeling of ownership. I generally like outsourcing my work, but not this time.
Since I decided to not go with the consultants. I informed the same to the builders and we scheduled a date on when we will meet at the registrar’s office. (In my case, the sub-registrar’s office). They didn’t had any problems with me going self registry. (I mean, why will they, it’s not their headache how I get the registry done). I strategically planned it to be a Wednesday in hopes of less crowd at the government office as it’s middle of week. But boy was I wrong. Anyway, back to the topic.
Now before the meeting, I had to get the stamp duty paid to the government. I searched online on what is the process and found that for Karnataka, the is a service called K2 (Khajane-II). The website is (https://k2.karnataka.gov.in). Since it’s a domain ending with .gov.in, I was okay with trusting them as they have very low chances of being a scam. Now, opening that website, it was in Kannada (which is not my strong point). But luckily, they had an english translation as well for their website. On their page, they had service for Challan Generation.
This opens a form and that looks very early 2000s. But hey, I don’t judge the functionality by it’s looks, if it works, it works. So, I went on filling the form, most of the things were pretty clear but one form field was confusing. Actually, two. The Purpose and Sub Purpose of the payment.
I was uncertain about what to fill in these fields because if I fill the challan under wrong head, it might take months to get the money back or I might not even get it back. So, I had to be sure what to select in the Purpose field. I was so uncertain that I even went to a Lawyer to help me with what to fill in the purpose, but that was not helpful. After a lot of research I found the list of all the purposes and sub purposes on a government website. (I can’t remember that link now, but if you know, please share in the comments section). Anyway, after getting that document, I checked and was almost certain with what to fill in these two fields and then it struck me, I could’ve just asked the builder to send me a sample challan which will have the purpose and sub purpose of the payment. So, I asked them and they sent it to me in 5 minutes and there it was. Article 5(e) under stamp duty. I Spent 2 days of research and even paid the laywer for his time, all of which could’ve been avoided had I just asked the builder for a sample.
Anyway, finally for me the purpose was paying Stamp Duty and the Sub purpose was Article 5(e) — Agreement for Sale of Immoveable Property. The document I was getting registered was Agreement of Sale and the type of property was Immoveable. Mainly because, well it was immoveable. Moveable properties are like Vehicles, machines, etc which can be moved from one location to another.
Also, one thing to note, payments over ₹2,000 needs to be done by netbanking and I cannot use my Credit Cards to make payment for that (Otherwise I would have got those sweet sweet reward points). Anyway, after paying the challan of 0.1% of the total sale value, I was ready for the main day. I had already gone through the draft agreement and checked all the details.
Now comes the D-Day. We (Me and two other witnesses, my friends) drive roughly 40 Kms to go to the sub-registrar’s office and the representative from the builder side was already present there. We reached around 11AM as scheduled to get the process started. We go to the main office and despite it being middle of the week, it was crowded. Still we managed somehow, trying to avoid physical contact and everything (You know, COVID-19). Then we came to know that there were 2 charges which we didn’t knew about and they had to be paid. If I had known about it beforehand, I would have added it to my challan and then paid it online. These were the charges.
₹500 — Registration Fees
This is the basic fees for the registration on the Kaveri Portal for the process of registry.
₹2,100 — Scanning Charges
Honestly, I think this is the most expensive scanning I might have ever seen. These are the charges for getting the documents scanned and uploaded to the Kaveri Portal.
What is Kaveri you ask? It is another portal by the government of Karanataka where they store all the registry information I think land related specificaly is stored in the Bhoomi portal, haven’t registered on that portal yet but I think it can be accessed by this (https://kaverionline.karnataka.gov.in/). This is also a gov.in subdomain, so I think I can trust it.
Now since I had not paid these charges online, I paid them at the sub-registrar’s office in Cash. (I did get the Challan receipt for that, so not a problem, it’s an official payment). It would’ve been convinient if I knew about this before and would’ve paid online. But it’s okay.
Also there were some miscellaneous charges of ₹6,000 (I don’t remember exactly for what they were, but it had to be paid). I remember intially the charges were quoted as ₹7,000 but one of my friends was fluent in Kannada and was able to negotiate it down to ₹6,000. Also, I remember asking the builder how much generally is charged and I remember they mentioned that sometimes people pay ₹4,000 and sometimes upto ₹9,000. So, I guess it depends, maybe on the property value or something. But I don’t know anything with certainity about this miscellaneous payment.
I read the document and it was matching the draft so I was okay with signing it as I had already checked the draft before. I had to sign on each page of that 55 page document, it took some time and it was a tideous process. But it had to be done. Then I submitted my documents to the counter of registration and they were literally kept in the bundle of other documents pending for that day. If I remember correctly, I saw atleast 4–5 other documents of the same project of the builder. So, people were buying in that project 😅. Anyway, it was now just waiting. We waited roughly 1 hour 30 minutes for our turn and then went to that counter to get the Aadhaar verified, (OTP Verification, so make sure that the Aadhar phone number is there). Also, then they took my photograph and left thumb impression and that’s it. We are done with the process. It was around 1:30 PM. So, it took roughly 2 hours 30 minutes from start to end.
Now my account was created on the Kaveri Portal but the scanning was yet to be done, the representative of the builder said that we can go back as that will take around 2hours and they can hand deliver the documents next day to my place. But since we already had travelled so much and had taken a full day leave from office, we thought we will get the document and then only go back.
Now, what do we do for 2hours? Luckily, for us, there was a shopping mall around 30 minutes drive from the sub-registrar’s office so we went there and spent 1, 1½ hours there and then went back to the sub registrar’s office. Upon reaching, the document was stamped, scanned and ready for collection. So, we collected and on our way back to home. It was around 4:00 PM by now but it’s okay as I had the Registered Agreement of Sale in my hands!
With the Agreement of Sale registered 🎉, next thing for me is to research and decide with which lender will I be going for Loan of the property (Basically, Loan Shopping). So, if you want to catch that, make sure to follow me and if you liked this story, show some love by applauding below. Share your experiences on getting the Agreement of Sale registered and what was the process like for you. Till then, see you in the next one. 👋
