The Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority (HRERA) has directed Ocus Skyscrapers Realty to pay interest at 10.8% per annum to a homebuyer for delaying possession of a commercial unit in its Ocus 24K project in Sector 68, Gurugram.
The order came on a complaint filed by buyer Archana Dubey, who had booked a commercial unit in the project under a buyer's agreement dated December 16, 2013. As per the agreement, the developer was to hand over possession within 60 months of execution — putting the contractual deadline at December 16, 2018.
That deadline came and went without possession. The project's occupation certificate was granted only on July 17, 2019, roughly seven months later. The developer formally offered possession the following day, on July 18, 2019.
What the Authority ordered
Taking note of the delay, HRERA held that the buyer was entitled to interest for the period between the due date of possession and the date the offer of possession was actually made. It fixed the rate at 10.8% per annum — the rate prescribed under Rule 15 of the Haryana Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Rules, 2017, which pegs delayed-possession interest to the State Bank of India's marginal cost of lending rate plus a fixed margin.
Beyond the interest payout, the order carries two other directions that matter for the buyer going forward:
The developer must execute the conveyance deed in the buyer's favour within three months of the order.
The developer is barred from levying any charge on the buyer that isn't explicitly provided for in the original buyer's agreement — a direction aimed squarely at the practice of builders adding fresh charges after possession is delayed.
Why this fits a pattern
The Ocus order isn't an outlier. It fits a template HRERA has applied repeatedly over the past two years in possession-delay disputes across Gurugram: the buyer is entitled to interest for every month of delay, calculated from the contractual due date, at whatever rate Rule 15 works out to at the time. Builders have been on the receiving end of this in projects ranging from Emaar's Palm Gardens to Raheja Developers' Aranya City and Tashee Land Developers' Capital Gateway, with awarded rates typically sitting between 10.8% and 11% per annum.
What varies case to case is the length of the delay, not really the rate. Some buyers, like Dubey, have waited a matter of months past their contractual date. Others have waited years — homebuyers in Tashee's Capital Gateway project waited nine years for possession; a TDI Tuscan Floors buyer in Sonipat waited eleven. HRERA's interest formula treats all of these the same way: it compounds monthly for as long as the developer sits on possession, which means the total payout scales with how long the builder delays, not with any separate penalty for the scale of the lapse.
For a commercial buyer like Dubey, where the underlying capital tends to be larger and often financed, that compounding matters. A seven-month delay on a mid-sized commercial unit can still translate into a meaningful sum once 10.8% is applied to the amount already paid.
The broader signal for developers
Ocus Skyscrapers Realty has been a repeat name before HRERA and the Haryana Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, with multiple complaints on record across its Ocus 24K and Ocus Medley projects in Gurugram, spanning both residential and commercial allottees. This latest order adds to that list, though it's a relatively contained one — a seven-month delay is short by the standards of some of the multi-year disputes the Authority has dealt with involving other builders.
Still, the direction restraining post-delay charges is worth flagging separately. It's become a recurring feature of HRERA orders: buyers frequently report being asked to pay holding charges, escalation costs, or other add-ons at the point of possession, on top of amounts already paid under the original agreement. By explicitly barring anything not covered in the buyer's agreement, the Authority is closing off a route developers have used to recover costs from delays that were their own doing.
For homebuyers watching these orders accumulate, the practical takeaway is straightforward: a missed possession date under RERA isn't just a delay to be waited out. It creates an interest liability that runs from the contractual due date, applies regardless of how the delay is explained, and stacks up the longer it continues. Developers, for their part, are increasingly finding that regulatory relief tends to include the conveyance deed and a ban on side charges, not just the interest figure that makes the headline.
