RERA Form 5 explained: how to actually track your builder during construction
Form 5 is the annual RERA certificate that tells you whether your redevelopment money is being spent on your project. Here's what it is, who signs it, and how a society should read it.
Once demolition is done and construction begins, most society members feel they have lost visibility. The building is a hole in the ground, the developer sends optimistic updates, and there is no obvious way to check whether the project is actually on track or quietly starving for funds.
RERA gives you one of the better instruments for exactly this: Form 5.
What Form 5 is
Under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, a registered project must maintain a separate designated bank account into which a defined share of the amounts collected from the project is deposited. The money in that account can only be withdrawn for the cost of construction and land, in proportion to project completion.
Form 5 is the annual report on that discipline. It is a certificate, filed with the regulator, confirming that withdrawals from the designated account were in line with the project's stage of completion. In Maharashtra it is filed on the MahaRERA portal for each registered project, year by year.
Who signs it
Form 5 is certified by a Chartered Accountant. It is not a self-declaration by the builder; it is an independent professional attestation that the money discipline RERA requires has actually been followed. That independence is the point — it is why Form 5 is worth more than a developer's own progress email.
Why a society should care
For a redevelopment, Form 5 answers the question that keeps committees awake: is the money going into our building, or somewhere else? A pattern of withdrawals that runs ahead of physical progress is a warning sign. So is a missing or delayed Form 5.
It sits alongside the other annual RERA filings — the architect's certificate on the percentage of physical work completed and the engineer's certificate on cost incurred — to give an outside, professional view of project health.
How to read it as a committee
You do not need to be an accountant to use Form 5 well. Ask three questions:
- Is it filed, on time, every year the project is registered? Absence is itself information.
- Does the money withdrawn roughly track the physical progress you can see and that the architect's certificate reports? Large withdrawals against little visible work deserve questions.
- Is the same CA signing consistently, and is the project's RERA registration current (not lapsed or extended repeatedly)?
Where to find it
Every MahaRERA-registered project has a public page on the regulator's website, searchable by project name or registration number. The annual certificates, including the CA's report, are part of that public record. A committee should know its project's RERA registration number by heart and check the page periodically — not just at the start.
The committee habit worth building
Put a standing item on your managing committee agenda: "RERA status check." Once a quarter, someone pulls up the project's MahaRERA page, notes the registration validity, the latest filings, and any complaints recorded against the project. It takes ten minutes and it is the cheapest insurance your society will ever buy.
Form 5 will not, by itself, stop a determined defaulter. But a society that reads it is a society that spots trouble early — while there is still a bank guarantee to invoke and time to act.
This is an educational overview of how Form 5 functions in redevelopment. Specific RERA requirements and forms change; confirm the current position on the MahaRERA portal and with your own advisors.
Editorial, not legal or financial advice. Consult your own advisors before deciding.
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