What to check before you list a property

The worst moment in a brokerage is not losing a buyer. It is losing a buyer at the registry, because something in the paperwork was never checked and the deal collapses with everybody's time already spent.

Almost all of it is discoverable before you take the photographs.

Start with the revenue record

Before the pictures, before the price, ask for the documents.

• Fard / jamabandi — the record of rights. Whose name is actually on the land.
• Khasra number — check it against the plot you were shown. Not against the plot you were told about.
• Mutation — has the transfer to the current owner actually been recorded, or is it pending. A pending mutation is not fatal, but it is a timeline you need to know about now rather than later.
• Conversion status — is agricultural land actually permitted for the use being advertised.

Then the people

More deals die on ownership than on title.

Ask who else has a claim. Inherited property with several heirs is normal and perfectly saleable — but every heir has to be on board, and finding out in month three that a brother in another city disagrees is how a listing becomes a story you tell at dinner. Get the names early. Write them down in the record, not in your head.

Then the physical facts

• Road access, and the width of that road. A plot with no legal access is a different asset.
• Whether the boundary on the ground matches the boundary on paper.
• Any existing tenancy, and on what terms.
• Encumbrances: loans against the property, pending litigation.

Record it where the next person will look

The check is only worth doing once. If the answers live in the agent's phone, the firm will do it again — or, more expensively, will not.

This is the honest argument for holding listings in a system rather than a folder. The property carries its own file: who verified it, when, and what they found. When the same plot comes back to market in two years, or when the agent who took it leaves, the work is still there.

BluPlots makes every listing pass an admin's approval before it goes public, which sounds like bureaucracy and is really just a checkpoint: somebody other than the person who took the listing has looked at it. The rejection reason goes back to them, in writing. It is a small ritual that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still cheap.

An uncomfortable rule of thumb

If the owner cannot produce the fard within a week, that is information. Not a reason to walk away, but a reason to price the delay into your expectations — and a reason not to promise a buyer a timeline you have no basis for.