Special situations
Stalled assets, priced honestly.
India holds a national inventory of part-built projects, and a growing class of capital buys them. The buyer's problem is not courage. It is arithmetic nobody has done: what it truly costs to finish, which approvals are still alive, and what the registers already say about the counterparty. We do that arithmetic, and we put our name on it.
01 · The inventory
Scale, stated honestly
A stalled project is not a failed asset. It is a solvent asset with a broken capital stack.
The soft counts of India's stalled stock diverge by definition and vintage, and we decline to headline any of them. The hard count is narrower and harder: five hundred and fifty-three real-estate insolvencies admitted to the courts, ninety-five resolved. The constraint is not capital. It is completability.
Why projects stall is now documented at the source, and the ranking surprises people who have not read it. Fragmented land structures come first: the building is in the deal and the land often is not. Missing cost-to-complete information comes second. Frozen collections come third. Diversion, the popular villain, sits below all three. The money did not simply vanish. The structure failed, and structure is a thing diligence can read.
02 · The finding of record
The state named the gap
The regulator has written down why bids fail: nobody knows the cost to complete.
India's insolvency board convened a committee on real-estate resolution, and its report says the quiet part in plain administrative prose: independent assessments of cost to complete, pending work schedules and construction sequencing are generally unavailable; information memoranda omit approval status and validity; and bidders, as a consequence, are unable to price risk or commit to timelines.
Read that finding once more, inverted, and you have this mandate's scope of work. An independent cost to complete, engineered from the drawings and the site rather than lifted from the promoter's last claim. A pending-works schedule with sequencing. An approvals register with validity dates. The state has published the description of the missing product. We build the product.
Value in Indian real estate is realised through completion, not liquidation. That is the state's own position, and it is ours.
03 · The registers
Public, and better for it
Underwrite to the register, not to the claim list.
The delivery regulators publish more truth about a stalled scheme than any deck will volunteer: projects held in abeyance with the grounds stated, registrations lapsed and revoked, complaints and recovery warrants with amounts, and in the largest stalled market, registers that join the project record to the insolvency courts. The promoter's account of a project is a document. The regulator's account is a record.
Everything we read there is public, and we say so, because it is a stronger claim than implied privilege. The skill is not access. It is knowing which register answers which question, reading them against the site, and refusing to let a claim list stand where a record exists.
04 · The resurrection test
Five questions
Completability is not a feeling. It is five questions with evidence.
- 01 Are the approvals alive? Sanctions lapse on clocks, and approvals die of process, not of merit. Every consent is checked for validity, extension rights and the discretion that revival would require, with nothing assumed about that discretion.
- 02 Is the clearance defensible? After the courts' 2026 settlement, an environmental defect on a part-built asset is a number, not a demolition. But it is a number with conditions, and we compute it rather than wave at it.
- 03 Does the solvency screen pass? The state's own completion fund publishes its test in two lines: sold receivables plus unsold inventory against cost to complete. Most acquirers cannot compute either side honestly. We compute both, from the site and the registers, not from the promoter's model.
- 04 Where did the collections go? The escrow position reconstructed: what was collected, what reached the project, what the frozen accounts hold now. The answer shapes both price and the completion cash flow.
- 05 Who are the buyers already in it? Allottees are creditors here, with statutory rights and, in places, first refusal on the scheme itself. An association of allottees holds rights. It does not hold a site team. The plan must fund one, and account for every allottee on the record, not only those who filed.
05 · The completion economics
Proven at national scale
Completion is financeable when the file is honest.
The government's own last-mile fund has financed stalled projects through priority lending and delivered tens of thousands of homes doing it. Its existence proves the economics this practice relies on: a stalled project that passes the solvency screen is not charity, it is credit, and what stands between such projects and their completion is rarely money. It is a file nobody trusted.
Our re-baselined cost to complete is that file: quantities from the drawings and the site, rates from evidence, the pending-works schedule sequenced, contingency stated with its reasoning, and the whole of it re-performable by the lender's own advisers. When the number is honest, capital arrives. When it is inherited from the party that stalled, so is the outcome.
06 · The mandate
What we take
Diligence for the acquirer. Then the discipline to finish.
The acquisition itself belongs to your counsel and your bankers: the route, the plan, the pricing of the debt. Our mandate is the engineering and programme truth underneath their work: the resurrection test answered with evidence, the cost to complete re-baselined, the approvals register with dates, and the registers read before the first meeting with anyone selling.
Where the acquisition completes, the practice continues as itself: the recovery and step-in shape for delivery, monthly verification for the capital, and the exception protocol from the first day, because a rescued scheme deserves a tighter watch than a healthy one, not a looser one.
Enquiries
The practice answers.
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX
The development practice is led by Tanishq Chauhan. Correspondence reaches the principal directly.
Tanishq Chauhan on LinkedIn, opens in a new tab
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