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 what has actually been built and occupied nearby, what the local authority's approved plans say, and whether the asking price assumes infrastructure that is still only proposed.

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

I want the comparison set written down. Which nearby buildings are occupied, which units are vacant, what rents or sale prices have actually closed, and when? A broker's asking price is not a transaction. If the deal needs a road, metro connection, or new tenant base to justify today's price, I mark that as a dependency, not a fact.

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.

For commercial property, I want to see the lease, not just the rent headline. When does the lock-in end? Who pays maintenance and property tax? What happens after the current tenant leaves? A high quoted yield can conceal a short lease and a long, expensive vacancy. For a vacant asset, the rent is a target until a tenant signs and starts paying.

For residential property, keep the expected rent or resale price separate from the owner's carrying costs: maintenance, brokerage, repairs, and time without a tenant or buyer. The arithmetic is rarely complicated. The habit of leaving out awkward lines is the problem.

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. Clear title, litigation searches, the applicable approvals genuinely in place rather than "in process," and RERA registration status where the project is required to be registered, checked on the relevant state authority's portal rather than taken from the seller's word. An independent property lawyer should review the title documents and transaction structure. A good spreadsheet cannot repair a bad title.

The order matters. I would not spend weeks refining a rent projection for an asset whose legal documents have not been checked. First establish what is being sold and whether the seller can sell it. Then argue about the price.

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.

Ask for recent completed transactions in the same segment, not just listings. If there are few, the exit estimate needs a wider range and a longer timeline. That may still suit a patient buyer. It is a poor fit for someone who expects to use the money on a fixed date.

Put the bad case on the same page

Before recommending a deal, I want a version of the numbers where rent starts later, the tenant leaves earlier, repairs cost more, or the exit price is lower. These are ordinary ways a property can disappoint. If modest changes to those assumptions wipe out the case, the advertised return is doing too much work.

For a leased asset, remove six months of rent and add one round of brokerage and fit-out cost. For a development, push the completion date back and check what carrying costs do to the return. The point is not to predict the exact bad outcome. It is to see whether the buyer can survive a normal one.

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.