What We Actually Check Before Recommending a Real Estate Deal

Every real estate deal that reaches an investor has already been through a filter, and that filter is usually the seller's marketing team. By the time you're looking at the brochure, the location has been called "emerging," the returns have been projected on the best-case scenario, and the risks have been rounded down to zero. At Hacoco, where I advise investors on real estate deals across residential and commercial property in India, our job is mostly to undo that filter before any money moves.

Here's what we actually check, in the order we check it.

Location fundamentals, not location adjectives

"Prime location" and "upcoming corridor" mean nothing on their own. We look at three things instead: what's actually been built and occupied in the surrounding two kilometres in the last three years, what the local authority's approved master plan says is coming, and how the area has performed through at least one down cycle, not just the recent upswing everyone remembers.

A location with genuinely strong fundamentals doesn't need three adjectives to describe it. It needs occupancy data.

Cash flow reality, not projected returns

Every deck shows you the return on paper. We rebuild the numbers from the ground up: actual achievable rent per square foot in that micro-market today, not the rent the developer hopes to charge in three years, vacancy assumptions that account for a real leasing cycle, and maintenance and compliance costs that somehow never make it into the first version of the projection.

A projection is a story about the future. A rent roll is a fact about the present. We start with the fact and work forward carefully, not the other way around.

If the deal only works assuming rents rise faster than they have anywhere nearby in the last decade, that's not a projection. That's a hope wearing a spreadsheet.

Title clarity and legal exposure

This is the unglamorous part, and it's where more Indian real estate deals actually die than any market factor. Clear title, no pending litigation, all approvals genuinely in place rather than "in process," and RERA registration status verified directly, not taken from the seller's word. We've walked investors away from deals that looked excellent on every financial metric because the title had a complication that wouldn't surface for another two years, by which point it would have been someone else's problem to solve at their expense.

Exit liquidity, before you enter

The question we ask before anything else is: if this needs to be sold in three years instead of held for ten, who is the buyer, and how long does that sale actually take in this specific segment and location. Real estate liquidity varies enormously by asset type and micro-market, and most investors only think about this on the way out, when it's too late to do anything but wait.

The deals we walk away from

We turn down more deals than we bring to investors. Not because the returns are always bad on paper, but because the diligence surfaces something the brochure didn't mention: a title complication, an occupancy assumption that doesn't hold up against comparable properties, an exit market that's thinner than it looks. Saying no to a deal that looks fine on the surface is a harder conversation than saying yes, and it's most of what real diligence actually is.

If you're evaluating a real estate investment in India and want a second set of eyes on it before you commit, get in touch.