How We Check a Property Before a Client Buys, Sells, or Leaves It Alone for a Decade

Survey number 403, Jubilee Hills. 1,288 acres. Two plots inside it actually affected by a claim. The entire survey number on the prohibited properties list, and every owner in it unable to register a sale.

You might reasonably ask why a mutual fund distributor is writing about survey numbers.

The answer is the reason we run a property practice at all. Look at the balance sheet of almost any NRI client we work with and the largest single asset is not the portfolio. It is a plot or a flat in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh, bought years ago, often worth more than everything else combined, and it is the only asset nobody reviews. The portfolio gets looked at every quarter. The land gets looked at once, at purchase, and then not again for twenty years.

Capital preservation is the whole of our investment philosophy, and it does not stop at the edge of the portfolio. An asset you cannot sell is not preserved capital. It is a number on a statement. A plot with a break in its ownership chain, or a survey number sitting on a prohibited list, is worth nothing at all on the day you need the money, and that is the day you find out.

So we treat the public record as part of the review rather than a legal errand for later. What follows is the check itself: what the record holds, what it cannot tell you, and how we read it for clients who are not in the country.

The shape of the problem is rarely whether your papers are in order.

An owner who has lived abroad for fifteen years decides to sell a plot near Hyderabad. The buyer is found, the price agreed, and the registration will not go through. Sometimes the cause is at the owner’s end: a break in the ownership chain, an encumbrance nobody remembered, a revenue record still showing a name from two transfers ago. Sometimes, as above, the cause has nothing to do with them at all.

Either way, the information was sitting in a public record the whole time. Nobody looked, because looking meant being in India, and because the property was not causing trouble in the meantime.

Property that nobody checks is not dormant. It is accumulating.

The Records That Hold Most of the Answer

Three sources carry most of what you need. All public. None convenient.

The encumbrance certificate. An EC (think of it as the property’s bank statement: every registered transaction, in order) lists what has been registered against a property over a period you specify. Sales, gifts, partitions, mortgages, charges. Read across enough years it gives you the ownership chain, which is the thing that actually matters: an unbroken sequence from a known origin to the person proposing to sell. A gap in that chain is not a paperwork irregularity, it is the question.

Telangana issues it in one of two forms. Form 15 where the search found registered activity in the period, Form 16 where it found none. Assetly’s guide to encumbrance certificates walks through how to read one properly, including the trap that catches most people: the certificate covers only the years you asked for, so a short search returns a clean result and false comfort.

The prohibited property list. Section 22-A of the Registration Act, 1908, as it applies in Telangana, prohibits the registration of certain classes of document. In outline: transfers barred by any other statute, which is the route by which assigned land is caught; transfers of government-owned land, or of endowment and Waqf property, executed by someone not statutorily empowered to do so; land declared surplus under the land ceiling laws; and property the State has notified, including property attached by a civil, criminal or revenue court or under tax law.

Note that last category, because it is narrower than people assume. The trigger is attachment by a court, not a property merely being in dispute. Plenty of disputed property is not attached, and therefore not on this list.

If your survey number is on the notified list, sub-section (3) requires the registering officer to refuse the document, whatever your papers say. Sub-section (4) is the part owners rarely hear about: the State can de-notify, in whole or in part, on its own motion, on application, or to give effect to a High Court or Supreme Court order. Entries come off. It takes work.

The provision itself is settled law. The Telangana High Court upheld its constitutional validity in M/s Invecta Technologies Pvt Ltd v State of AP in October 2023, holding that the possibility of misuse does not make it bad, and that it does not violate the right to property under Article 300A.

The revenue record. This is where ownership is recorded for revenue purposes, separately from registration. Mutation is the step that updates it.

Here most guides published before this year are now wrong, so it is worth being precise. For registered sales of agricultural land, mutation is largely automatic in both states. Telangana’s Bhu Bharati (Record of Rights in Land) Act, 2025 has registration done by a Tahsildar-cum-Joint Sub-Registrar who amends the Record of Rights on registration. Andhra Pradesh has run auto-mutation from the sub-registrar’s office since a 2018 amendment, and in August 2026 extended the same integration to municipal records, with mutation fees collected at registration.

Where mutation is still a separate step, and still routinely skipped, is inheritance, succession, wills and corrections, plus municipal records in Telangana. Which is exactly how a property ends up registered in your name while the village record still shows your late father’s. That mismatch surfaces at sale, at mortgage and at inheritance, three occasions when you can least afford it.

Beyond these three, there is a wider document set most owners do not hold complete: link documents, approved layout and building plans, conversion orders where they apply, tax receipts in sequence.

What the 22-A Row Actually Shows

Telangana’s prohibited list has been a political fight since August 2026, and the numbers being quoted at you are not measuring the same things. This matters if you own property there, so here is the state of it.

The opposition BRS alleges the prohibited extent rose from about 16 lakh acres to about 1.16 crore acres after the Bhu Bharati migration. Speaking in the Legislative Assembly on 13 September 2026, Revenue Minister Ponguleti Srinivas Reddy gave a different picture: 1,02,52,690 acres in December 2023 against 1,02,05,250 acres in August 2026. Broadly flat.

The composition is the part worth reading twice. On the minister’s own breakdown for 31 August 2026, of that 1.02 crore acres:

The Chief Minister, separately, put genuinely disputed private land at roughly 3.06 lakh acres out of 2.5 crore acres notified in the state.

So the headline jump is mostly categories that were always legally prohibited becoming searchable against a survey number for the first time. What changed for most owners was not the law. It was the visibility.

That is not the same as saying nothing went wrong. It plainly did, and the government has accepted as much. At a public meeting in Kukatpally on 12 August 2026, Chief Minister Revanth Reddy acknowledged cases where an entire survey number had been marked under 22-A although only two or three acres inside it were actually subject to a court order or a government claim, and said the affected portions would be separated so the rest could be registered. Around 750 removal applications were pending from Hyderabad, Medchal, Rangareddy and Sangareddy, a helpline had taken 1,162 calls, and more than 6,000 cases were reported pending before the Telangana High Court.

There is one practical consequence you should know before you go looking. The Registration and Stamps Department’s public prohibited-property pages are currently not showing the data. Both the pages the department links carry the same notice:

“Prohibition data is under review. it will be published soon…”

So the official list is suspended while it is reworked. In the meantime, land-parcel status can be checked on the Bhu Bharati portal, which carries a grievance route specifically for inclusion in the prohibited properties list.

Andhra Pradesh is the same section, moving the other way. AP is not a separate regime, a thing plenty of advice online gets wrong. Section 22-A was inserted by an undivided Andhra Pradesh amendment in 2007 and both successor states inherited it. What differs is the list, the notifying practice and the portal. And the direction: in January 2026 AP de-notified five categories, including private patta lands and genuine assignments made before 18 June 1954. So a clean result in one state tells you nothing at all about the other. Check the state’s own list, through the AP registration department or the district collectorate.

Why Doing This From Abroad Fails

The information is public. Assembling it is not.

The records sit across separate portals with separate conventions, and the conventions move. Telangana replaced Dharani with Bhu Bharati in April 2025. Andhra Pradesh integrated registration with municipal records in August 2026. A walkthrough written two years ago describes screens that no longer exist.

Prohibited-list entries attach without notifying the owner, which is why every owner in survey number 403 found out at the counter. An EC covers only the period you request. And the usual substitute, asking a relative or a local agent to check, produces a verbal assurance rather than a document, from someone who may be reading a different record than the one applied at the sub-registrar’s office.

The deeper problem is that this is not a one-time task. A title check is a snapshot of a moving object. Most owners take one, at purchase, and then none for twenty years.

How We Run It

For clients in our Maintain, Buy and Sell practice, the property check is a standing workflow rather than an event.

At onboarding we establish a baseline: the ownership chain from the EC, the current prohibited-list position, mutation status, dues. We use Assetly for the record side of this. It is built for the same problem we are solving, remote owners of property in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, and it consolidates checks that otherwise mean several portals and a local errand. Its guide to Section 22-A is also the clearest explanation of the register we have found, including how to get an entry removed.

From there the document set gets stored somewhere other than a cupboard in a house nobody lives in, and monitoring is switched on, so an encumbrance update or a tax due surfaces in the same month rather than at the point of sale. Where a correction or a filing is needed, that is our side of the work: mutation filings, certified document retrieval, a survey where boundaries are in question, or a referral to counsel where the matter is genuinely legal.

For a sale the sequence runs in reverse. Title readiness first, defects cleared next, buyer conversations only after. We have watched too many negotiations collapse in week six over something that would have taken a month to fix in week zero.

What the Record Does Not Tell You

We would be overselling this badly if we stopped there.

The record shows what is registered, not what is happening. Encroachment, possession, a boundary wall three feet inside your line, a tenant of eleven years. None of it appears in an EC. Somebody has to stand on the land. For an owner who has not visited in years, this is the check that matters most and the one no portal performs, which is why the physical side of our Maintain practice exists at all: watchmen, boundary walls and fencing, and encroachment prevention are not document work.

Unregistered transactions are invisible. An agreement to sell, an oral family arrangement, a will. All capable of producing a claim, none of it in the encumbrance record.

Litigation may not surface at all. Remember that 22-A catches property attached by a court, not property in dispute. A separate court search is its own exercise.

Records lag, and sometimes they are simply wrong. Survey number 403 is the demonstration. A tool reads the record faster and more reliably than a person can. It cannot make the record true.

And right now, one source is switched off. With the department’s prohibited-property pages under review, any check against that register, ours included, is working from the most recent published position rather than a live one. If you are registering a transaction in Telangana this month, ask specifically what your search was run against and when. We would rather tell you the source is unavailable than imply a currency we cannot demonstrate.

So the honest description of what we do is narrower than “we verify your title”. We establish what the public record says, we keep watching it, and we act quickly when it changes. Where the record is silent, wrong or suspended, that needs a person: a surveyor, a lawyer, or somebody willing to visit. We will tell you which, rather than pretend a document check covers it.

If you own property in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh and have not looked at its record in some years, book a call.

Sources. Registration Act, 1908 as in force in Telangana, section 22-A · Telangana Registration and Stamps Department prohibited property list (currently under review) · Bhu Bharati portal · Telangana High Court on the validity of section 22-A · Revenue Minister’s figures, Telangana Today · Chief Minister’s Kukatpally statement, Telangana Today · Chief Minister on disputed private land, Deccan Chronicle · AP registration department.

Also referenced. Assetly, Telangana Section 22A: Check a Property and Fix a Wrong Entry (30 July 2026) · Assetly, Encumbrance Certificate Meaning: What It Is and What It Misses (24 March 2026).

Figures on the Telangana prohibited list are as stated in the Assembly and in press reporting to 14 September 2026, and this is a fast-moving matter. Open the official portal and confirm your own position rather than relying on this summary.

General information, not legal advice on any specific property.

North Pole South Pole Financial Services · AMFI registration number 286779 · AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor. Our real estate and compliance practices are professional services outside the scope of that registration.