Redevelopment agreements get negotiated over carpet area, corpus and timeline. The finish — the part members live with for the next thirty years — usually gets one line saying 'as per sample flat'. Here is what to specify instead.
Redevelopment is now the main way new housing gets built in Mumbai. Land is finished, so growth comes from replacing what is already standing, and suburban Mumbai accounts for the overwhelming majority of it. Developers signed close to seventy redevelopment agreements in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and separately, well over a thousand societies are pursuing self-redevelopment under the state framework rather than handing the project to a developer at all.
Whichever route a society takes, the same thing tends to happen to the finishing specification: it gets settled last, or not at all.
Why 'as per sample flat' is not a specification
The sample flat is built by the best team available, without a schedule, to be photographed. Every flat after it is built by whoever is on site that month, against a deadline. A clause saying the finish will match the sample gives a society nothing it can enforce, because match is unmeasurable and the sample is usually dismantled before possession anyway.
What is enforceable is a written specification: named materials with a grade, and a stated method for the parts nobody can inspect once they are covered.
What to write into the agreement
- Tile and stone specified by make, size, grade and finish — not 'vitrified tiles, reputed make'
- Bathroom waterproofing described as a method with a hold point: membrane, turn-up height at wet walls, and a ponding test recorded before the screed
- Concealed plumbing pressure-tested and recorded before tiling closes over it
- Kitchen platform material, counter thickness and dado height stated
- Window system, frame material and sill detail named, with the external sealing described
- Common areas — lobby, staircase, lift surrounds — specified separately, because they are the first thing cut when a budget tightens
- A defect-correction window after possession, with a named point of contact
Three questions that separate a real answer from a good one
- Who is on site daily during finishing, and who do we call when something is wrong on the eleventh floor?
- What is checked and recorded before it gets covered up, and can a committee member witness a ponding test?
- Is the whole finishing scope with one contractor, or split across trades appointed separately?
The third matters more than committees expect. When the waterproofer, the plumber and the tiler are appointed separately, the junctions between their work belong to nobody. That junction is where seepage starts, and it is where a society spends its corpus in year four.
Self-redevelopment changes who needs to know this
In builder-led redevelopment a society is a client with a contract. In self-redevelopment the society is the developer: it arranges the finance, appoints the project management consultant and the contractors, and carries the quality decision itself. That is the appeal — the development margin stays with the members — and it is also the exposure. Nobody else is going to write the finishing scope on the society's behalf.
Committees taking that route usually get sound advice on approvals, funding and the tender. The finishing package is where the advice thins out, largely because it arrives late and looks like a detail. It is roughly half the build programme and effectively all of what members will judge the project by.
The sequencing point nobody plans for
Finishing work in a redevelopment runs against a constraint a new-build does not have: members are paying rent elsewhere, and every month of delay is a real cost to them. That pressure is exactly what causes finishing to be rushed at the end — trades stacked on top of one another, waterproofing covered before it is tested, snagging skipped so possession can be offered on a date somebody promised.
The protection against it is a finishing programme planned floor by floor from the start and agreed before the first flat is handed over, not renegotiated once the schedule is already slipping.
Chamunda Constructions has run the finishing phase on redevelopment and SRA schemes across Kandivali, Malad, Borivali and Mulund since 2004. If your society is at the stage of drafting a specification, we are happy to walk a committee through what a finishing scope should actually say.