Land In The Sky: How Vertical Property Cards Could Reshape Urban India

By Parneet Sachdev, IRS

New Delhi, December 22, 2025: Vertical property cards sound like a small tweak in paperwork. In reality, if Maharashtra executes the idea well, they could redraw the legal map of urban home ownership in India. For decades, the legal architecture of apartments has been out of sync with how people actually live. Nearly half of Maharashtra’s population now lives in urban areas, with vertical housing in Mumbai–Pune–Thane becoming the dominant form of shelter and investment (Census 2011).

The global real estate market is projected to reach a value of US$654.39 trillion by the end of 2025. For India to partake a significant share of this enormous pie, ease of doing business in real estate must climb from a measly 154 into the top 10.

Current Land Records System Records Only Name Of Society Or Builder

Apartment owners share a portion of the land as an undivided interest in the common areas and facilities, a principle mirrored in Section 4 of the Maharashtra Apartment Ownership Act. Also specified in Section 4(2) of the Punjab Apartment Ownership Act, 1995 and other similar state acts. The statutes are lucid and unequivocal.

Yet the land-revenue records in every state do not reflect this reality. Take the case of Maharashtra. Here the records, known as 7/12 land records in Maharashtra typically show details of land ownership for high rise buildings in the names of the society or the builder. Ownership of a flat is proved through a sale deed and a cooperative share certificate. But the state’s core land register often remains stubbornly silent on who actually lives above that land and even more silent about the share of the flat owner in that land. Even though a portion of the land is, by statute, an indelible part of the owner’s right on the apartment.

How Maharashtra is Addressing This Anomaly

It is this disconnect that the proposed “vertical property card” seeks to resolve. Since 2022 the Maharashtra government has been working on a scheme to issue independent property cards for flats—“vertical properties”—beginning with projects registered under MahaRERA (Acerealty, ToI).

The idea has been refined through a revised proposal taken up in late 2024, explicitly envisaging a card that records carpet area, amenity space, details of any bank loan and a link to the 7/12 extract. In October–November 2025 the state went a step further, setting up an eight-member high-level committee to frame “Vertical Property Rules” and standardise how individual flat-owners’ names and shares will be recorded in land records across Maharashtra (homes and buildings, free press journal).

The broad contours, however, are clear from official statements and explanatory material published by the state and by real-estate intermediaries. Each flat owner is to receive a separate “vertical property card” that shows the building’s total plot area, the flat’s carpet area, and the owner’s defined share in the underlying land and common structure.

That card would be digitally authenticated (for example through QR codes and digital signatures) and integrated with the existing urban property card and rural 7/12 systems. In practical terms, a flat in a 10,000 sq ft plot would no longer float as a legal fiction above land that belongs only to the society or the developer. Instead, the owner’s name and proportionate share would be etched into the land-record itself, alongside the survey number and other encumbrances.

The Statute

The Maharashtra Apartment Ownership Act, 1970 (MAOA) already recognises an apartment as heritable, transferable property and provides that each apartment owner holds an undivided interest in the common areas and facilities of the building (India Code). The vertical property card proposal seeks to carry the MAOA’s logic into the last mile of administration: the 7/12 and property card, where the state itself certifies who owns what.

Seen in that light, Maharashtra is not inventing a new philosophy of ownership; it is trying to make its own records catch up with the theory its laws already endorse.

What Happens Globally

In the United States, a condominium is legally defined as a combination of two interests: title to an individual unit and an undivided interest in the common elements, including the land, foundations, roofs, stairways and shared utilities (oregon.gov).

• Each unit owner is assessed for their percentage share in those common elements for taxation and voting, but that share cannot be separated from the unit; it travels with the apartment when it is sold. In many civil-law jurisdictions, condominium ownership similarly includes a fraction of the common property and the obligation to contribute to its costs (ScienceDirect).
• Australia’s strata title system follows the same conceptual path. Every lot (apartment) carries a “unit entitlement”, which determines the owner’s voting rights, share of outgoings and undivided share in the common property (esmstrata.com.au). Common property is owned by all proprietors as tenants-in-common in proportions fixed by that unit entitlement; no single owner can carve out a piece of the lobby or the garden and claim it outright.
• In Singapore, strata developments governed by the Land Titles (Strata) Act and the Building Maintenance and Strata Management Act operate on a similar basis. Each subsidiary proprietor’s “share value” reflects their proportionate interest in the common property, determines their voting strength and their share of maintenance contributions, and is recorded on the strata title itself (ResearchGate).
• Across modern jurisdictions the pattern is clear: apartment ownership always includes a mathematically defined and administratively recorded share in the land and the common property.

Internationally, this move attempts to place Maharashtra closer to the mainstream of modern apartment jurisprudence.

Costs and Gains

The economic stakes of that grafting are substantial. Urban India has a chronic housing shortage alongside a vast, illiquid stock of under-used dwellings. One estimate notes millions of vacant homes in urban areas even as slum households make up around 17 per cent of the urban population (OECD). This creates a paradox of simultaneous housing scarcity and housing inefficiency

At the same time, India’s formal processes for registering property and enforcing contracts remain slow and costly by international standards. The World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report placed India 154th out of 190 economies on registering property, noting that it still took, on average, 58 days and cost roughly 7.8 per cent of a property’s value to register a standard transaction.

Studies of litigation in Mumbai real estate have shown projects delayed by years because of disputes over title, redevelopment rights and overlapping claims (research.manchester.ac.uk).

Against this background, the vertical property card can have an enormous impact. When a flat owner’s name, share in land and encumbrances are all visible in a unified digital land record, banks need fewer weeks of title search, prospective buyers need fewer rounds of legal opinions, and developers have fewer excuses to obfuscate ownership during redevelopment. A clear, state-certified ledger is, in economic terms, a powerful collateral.

Risk Reduction and Redevelopment

On the mortgage side, banks and housing-finance companies price risk into interest rates and loan-to-value ratios. Where titles are messy, margins widen. Vertical property cards could lower information risk and, over time, reduce the “urban title premium” that households pay in higher borrowing costs. International empirical work consistently links strong, transparent property-rights systems with deeper credit markets and higher investment (World Bank).

Mumbai’s much-discussed urban renewal drive, from BDD chawls to sprawling MHADA estates depends on thousands of individual households consenting to complex deals involving temporary relocation, new units and profit-sharing.

Today those negotiations often rest on a tangle of society share certificates, power-of-attorney arrangements and opaque land records. When each flat owner has a recorded share in the underlying land and building, their bargaining position vis-à-vis developers becomes more concrete. Compensation formulae whether in the form of larger replacement flats, additional FSI benefits or cash can be tied to a legally defined share rather than a politically negotiated one.

Inheritance and intra-family transfers may be among the quietest beneficiaries. Today, succession in urban flats often requires society resolutions, no-objection certificates, share-certificate endorsements and mutation entries. When the land-record itself reflects the new owner, banks, courts and registrars have a simpler anchor for mutation, lending and dispute resolution. In a judicial system where resolving a commercial dispute can still take over 1,400 days and consume a large slice of the claim value, such reductions in ambiguity matter (World Bank).

Challenges

The committee, now working on Vertical Property Rules has to reconcile several overlapping frameworks. The MAOA’s condominium model coexists uneasily with the more common cooperative-society structure, and each has different implications for control, voting rights and management of common areas (vedlegal).

The revenue department’s systems for survey, subdivision and mutation were originally designed for fields and plots, not for towers. To allocate a meaningful land-share to each flat, the state will have to assign building footprints, recognise common areas and “air-space” rights, and map them to digital cadastral records.

Some popular commentaries have suggested that with vertical property cards, disputes will shrink from “15 years to 15 days” and that every transaction will be completed within forty-eight hours. However, even in countries with long-established condominium registers, complex disputes over common property, redevelopment or arrears of maintenance are not magically eliminated; they are merely better structured (Emerald).

Maharashtra’s reform will, at best, remove one large source of ambiguity, a profound one though.

In Singapore and Australia, strata and condo systems emerged alongside integrated land-title reforms. Strata plans are lodged with the land-title office; each unit gets its own folio in the register; and the law explicitly states that common property belongs to all subsidiary proprietors in undivided shares according to their share value or unit entitlement (strata-wa).

Maharashtra is however overlaying a new logic onto an existing land-revenue system. The success of vertical property cards will depend on how much that overlay becomes a genuine integration.

Still, the direction of travel is unmistakable and laudable. The state has moved to digitise land records, revisit archaic statutes such as the Fragmentation Act in urban areas and expand the legal toolkit for redevelopment and regularisation.

Can India Soar Into the Future?

As per various projections India’s real estate market is predicted to grow significantly, reaching $1 trillion by 2030, up from $200bn in 2021 and potentially $5-10 trillion by 2047. Contributing nearly 18% to GDP in the long run (IBEF). The global real estate market is expected to reach a value of US$654.39 trillion by the end of 2025 and grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 2.69% to 7.48% from 2025 to 2030 (Statista).

For India to partake a significant share of this enormous pie our laws and systems must reflect our new reality. In China and Singapore, registering property typically takes less than 5 days, India’s 58-day timeline creates friction that slows investment. Ease of doing business in real estate in India must climb from a measly 154 into the top 10.

Vertical cards and the connected reform are a vital keg in this voyage.

The author is the Chairman of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Realty & More’s views.