TL;DR
- Don’t sign the handover letter until you’ve done a physical walkthrough — once you sign, the builder’s obligation to fix most defects for free gets a lot harder to enforce.
- Collect five documents at possession: Occupancy Certificate, handover letter, final demand/no-dues letter, warranty card for fittings, and the approved building plan. Missing even one causes problems later — at resale, at loan closure, or when your interior designer needs load points confirmed.
- Walk every room with a checklist, not your gut. Electrical points, water pressure, seepage, door/window alignment, and floor level are the five things that quietly cost lakhs if missed at this stage.
- Prestige, Brigade, and Sobha each have their own handover patterns and common snag types — knowing what’s typical for your builder saves you from either panicking over normal variance or missing a real defect.
- Don’t call an interior designer on day one. Get civil defects fixed by the builder first — a designer can’t fix what the builder left behind, and paying to fix builder mistakes out of your own interior budget is money you’ll never get back.
Getting the keys to your Prestige, Brigade, or Sobha flat feels like the finish line. It isn’t. It’s the start of the part where the cost of a mistake goes from “annoying” to “expensive.” Every year, through Infrabob, we work with homeowners across Sarjapur Road, Whitefield, Hebbal, Koramangala, and HSR Layout who signed their handover letter in five minutes flat because the builder’s site team was polite, the sample flat looked great, and everyone else in the queue behind them was waiting too. Most of them found out three months later — usually while their interior designer was measuring for wardrobes — that a load point was missing, a bathroom had a slope in the wrong direction, or the “premium fittings” in the brochure weren’t what got installed.
This is the checklist we’d want a friend to have before they walk into their own possession appointment.
Documents first, keys second
Before you even step into the flat, get these five documents in hand:
- Occupancy Certificate (OC) — the single most important one. Without it, your home isn’t legally fit for occupation, your property tax and utility connections get complicated, and resale becomes a headache. Ask for the OC copy, not just a verbal confirmation that “it’s applied for.”
- Handover/possession letter — this is what you’ll be asked to sign. Read it before you sign it, not after. It typically starts the clock on your defect-liability window.
- Final demand letter or no-dues certificate — confirms there’s no pending amount the builder can chase you for later, and that nothing gets added quietly at a later stage.
- Warranty documentation for fittings — sanitaryware, modular kitchen (if provided), waterproofing warranty, and any structural warranty the builder offers. Bangalore builders often bundle these separately from the main agreement, and they get lost if you don’t ask for them explicitly at handover.
- Approved building plan / sanctioned plan copy — you’ll need this later regardless of who you hire for interiors, since load-bearing walls, plumbing shafts, and electrical risers all reference it. It also tells you if what was built matches what was approved.
Get physical copies or verified digital copies of all five before you sign anything. If the site team says “we’ll email it to you,” get a written acknowledgment of what’s pending and by when.
The room-by-room walkthrough
Bring a notepad, a phone charger, a bucket of water, and at least ninety minutes — rushing this is how homeowners in Whitefield and Sarjapur Road end up paying for snags out of their own pocket six months later.
Electrical
Check every switch, socket, and light point works — not just that they’re installed, but that they’re live. Bring a phone charger and test each socket. Count the load points against what was promised in your agreement (AC points in bedrooms, geyser points in bathrooms, chimney/hob points in the kitchen). This matters more than it sounds — retrofitting a missing AC point after your false ceiling goes up means breaking tiles or ceiling work you’ve already paid for.
Plumbing and water pressure
Run every tap for a few minutes. Check pressure in the highest bathroom of the flat, since that’s usually where builder-installed pumps show their weakness first. Flush every toilet. Check for leaks under sinks and around the geyser point. Pour a bucket of water in the balcony and bathroom floors and watch where it drains — this is the single fastest way to catch a slope defect before you’ve spent a rupee on flooring.
Seepage and dampness
Look at ceiling corners, especially in bathrooms that share a wall with a neighboring flat, and on any wall facing outside. Run your hand along the wall near window frames. Seepage that shows up now is a builder problem; seepage that shows up after your interior work starts becomes your problem, and reopening finished walls to fix it is one of the most expensive corrections a homeowner can make.
Doors, windows, and alignment
Open and close every door and window fully. Check they don’t scrape the floor, that locks engage properly, and that windows seal without gaps you can see daylight through. In several possession-stage flats we’ve seen in Hebbal and Koramangala, misaligned windows only became obvious once furniture was already in the room, by which point re-aligning them meant working around a full house.
Flooring and levels
Walk the full flat in socks and feel for uneven patches. Place a mobile phone flat on the floor near the level app (most phones have one built in) at a few points in each room — small variances are normal, but a consistent slope in one direction across a room is worth flagging.
Walls and ceiling
Check for cracks, especially near beam-column junctions. Hairline cracks from curing are usually normal; cracks wider than a hairline or ones that run diagonally from a corner are worth photographing and raising immediately.
Common patterns by builder
A few things we’ve noticed repeatedly across possession-stage flats from these three builders in Bangalore — not universal, but common enough to watch for specifically:
Prestige projects tend to have strong finish quality on the visible surfaces (flooring, painting) but homeowners should pay particular attention to electrical load point counts against what was promised in the original brochure, since these sometimes get trimmed in the final execution.
Brigade projects generally hand over with detailed documentation, which works in your favor — but cross-check the fittings brand and model actually installed against what’s listed in your agreement schedule, since substitutions do happen and you’re entitled to flag them at handover, not after.
Sobha is often cited for stronger construction quality control, but homeowners in Sobha projects should still specifically test water pressure on upper floors and in end-unit flats, where plumbing performance is most likely to vary from the show flat.
None of this means any of these builders are doing something wrong — it means these are the specific things worth spending extra time on for your specific builder, instead of treating every possession walkthrough as identical.
What to do — and not do — right after possession
Don’t call an interior designer on day one. This is the mistake we see most often, and it’s an expensive one. If there’s a civil defect — a seepage issue, a misaligned door frame, a plumbing snag — that’s the builder’s responsibility to fix under your handover agreement. Once your designer starts work on top of an unresolved civil issue, that defect becomes invisible until it resurfaces later, and by then it’s coming out of your interior budget, not the builder’s.
The right sequence looks like this:
- Complete the walkthrough and document every snag with photos, dated.
- Submit the snag list to the builder in writing and get a committed timeline for fixes.
- Re-inspect after the builder’s fixes are done — don’t take their word for it.
- Only then start designer conversations, site visits, and quotations.
This sequencing alone tends to save homeowners more money than any negotiation on the interior contract itself.
A quick note on timing
If you’ve just gotten possession, you’re at the exact stage where getting this sequence right compounds — every civil issue resolved now is one your interior designer won’t have to work around (and bill you for) later. It’s also the stage where meeting a few verified, independent designers — not tied to a single studio’s rotating decor budget — actually matters, because you want someone who’ll flag a builder defect honestly rather than build finishes over it. If you’re at that stage and want a shortlist of verified designers to compare, drop Infrabob a message on WhatsApp — happy to help you think it through.