What a buyer should be able to check

A buyer should be able to test what we say about progress against something other than our assurance. With the projects team I define the stages a tower passes through, from excavation and foundations to each roof slab, blockwork, services, finishes and the completion certificate from the planning authority. A stage appears in the app only when the responsible engineer has signed a dated record with photographs that quality colleagues have reviewed. When the expected window for the next stage moves, the app shows the new window and the reason. The same register feeds the quarterly project updates we file on the state RERA portal, so a buyer reading both sees a single account. My team owns the presentation and the publishing rules. Whether a stage is complete remains the judgement of the projects director and the architects who certify it.

A construction-linked plan is a series of promises running in both directions. Each demand should name its stage, the certificate behind it, the amount, the due date and the documents a lender will ask for. I design the demand so that a buyer with a home loan can forward one pack to the bank instead of collecting papers from three offices. I also treat the statement of account as a product: credits, interest, waivers and taxes should make sense without a call to our relationship desk. Where a delay lies with our own documents, the buyer should not bear interest for it. Finance owns collection policy and the accounting. I work with the chief financial officer on what the buyer sees and when, and on a weekly report of demands still waiting for documents.

Possession is where a buyer tests everything we have said for three or four years. I run the possession programme through a lead and twenty-eight colleagues across our sites. During the joint inspection we record snags room by room, each with a photograph and a category, and assign them to the contractor crew responsible. An item closes only when the owner accepts the repair in the app. Closure times and repeat snags go to the board every quarter. The programme also handles keys, meter transfers and the papers an owner needs for registration and loan closure. I keep a firm boundary with engineering. A crack may be cosmetic or may need a structural opinion; my team's job is to route it quickly to the person qualified to decide and to keep the owner informed until it is resolved.

In our projects the developer maintains the common areas until the owners' association is formed and ready to take charge, and that first year shapes how owners regard the company. Our owners' app handles maintenance requests, visitor entries, amenity bookings and the maintenance charges collected during the interim period. At takeover we pass across open requests, equipment records and warranty documents. Personal data is the delicate part. Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we share an owner's details with the association's facility manager only for purposes the owner has agreed to, and we remove what we no longer need to hold. I would rather hand over a smaller, cleaner record than an archive the association can neither lawfully use nor properly secure, and I check the transfer list myself.

Once a year I review every product we run against one question: does it make a buyer's or owner's commitment easier to check or to complete? Features that fail compete for the same designers and engineers as the possession and payment work that passes. I keep a written register of what we have stopped, naming the revenue, partner or internal sponsor we disappointed and the reason. In four years it has included the resident marketplace, a virtual-reality walkthrough opened by fewer than 2 per cent of visitors, and a referral scheme that paid existing owners for new bookings while their own handovers were late. Stopping a product is a decision the managing director and the affected function head should see before it happens, not read about afterwards in a monthly report.