Site Visit Checklist: 12 Things to Inspect on a Plot

Most people fly in for a weekend, walk the plot, like the view, and go home. Three months later they discover the access road belongs to someone else. The site visit is the one hour in the entire purchase where you can see what no document will tell you, and almost nobody uses it properly.

This matters more if you are buying from abroad. A Non-Resident Indian (NRI) buyer often gets one visit, sometimes none, and has to decide on photographs taken by someone with an interest in the sale. The checklist below assumes you get a single visit and want it to earn its cost.

Bring three things: a copy of the land record, a compass or a phone with one, and somebody local who is not the seller or the seller's agent.

The record of rights is the state's account of who owns the land and what it is. It goes by a different name in almost every state, which trips up buyers moving between them. Maharashtra calls it the 7/12 extract. Find out what yours is called and where it is issued before you travel, because the document is the thing your visit is testing.

Read it before the visit, not after. Our guide on how to read a 7/12 extract walks through the Maharashtra version line by line; the logic transfers.

What you are looking for is not confirmation. It is the gap between what the paper says and what the ground shows. The record says two acres. The fence encloses something that looks like more. The record names four co-owners. Only one is at the meeting. Those gaps are the entire point of going.

A fence marks where somebody put a fence. It does not mark the boundary.

Ask to see the survey stones or corner markers, and ask for the measurement plan that shows where they should be. If the seller cannot produce them, or the markers are missing, that is not a small administrative gap. It is the most common source of litigation in Indian land, and it does not surface until you try to build or sell.

Walk all four boundaries on foot. Not the road frontage, all of them. Encroachment shows up at the back, where nobody looks.

Stand on the plot and trace the route back to the public road. Then ask, at every stretch: whose land is this?

An access road that crosses private land is a right you either have in writing or do not have at all. Verbal assurance that "the neighbours have never minded" is not a right of way, and the neighbours change. Check that the access appears on the survey plan, and that its width is enough for a construction vehicle rather than just a car.

If the plot is inside a plotted development, internal roads are usually part of the layout approval, which is a different and better situation. That is one of the real distinctions between buying a plot in a scheme and buying raw land, covered in NA plot vs agricultural land.

Non-Agricultural, usually shortened to NA, is a classification, not a description. Agricultural land that looks like a building site is still agricultural land, and in most states you cannot build a house on it.

The record tells you the classification. The visit tells you whether anyone is behaving as though it is true. Standing crops, an irrigation channel, a tenant farmer working the land: all of those are signals that the classification on paper and the use on the ground have diverged, and that somebody may have a claim you have not been shown.

For an NRI buyer this is not a technicality. There are categories of Indian land that NRIs cannot buy at all, which we cover in why NRIs cannot buy agricultural land.

Ask who has been on this land in the last five years.

Tenancy, sharecropping and long occupation create rights in most Indian states, and those rights survive a sale. A tenant farmer with a long history on a plot is a legal position, not a nuisance to be managed after purchase.

The visit is when you find this out, because the record often will not say and the seller has no reason to raise it. Look for recent cultivation, a hut, stored equipment, a path worn across the plot. Then ask about each one.

Water is the thing buyers most often get wrong, in both directions.

If you are visiting in the dry months, ask where the water goes when it rains. Find the natural drainage line. Look at the vegetation for where standing water sits. Ask neighbours how high it came in the worst year they remember, and check the walls of nearby structures for a stain line.

If you are visiting in the monsoon, you are seeing the worst case, which is genuinely useful. It is also the season when access roads fail. We have written about the trade-offs of a wet-season visit in buying plots in the monsoon.

Then the other direction: where does drinking water come from? A borewell has a depth and a yield, and both are facts somebody can tell you. Neighbouring borewells going deeper each year is a signal about the aquifer that no document carries.

Look for the nearest transformer and the nearest pole, and count.

A connection is not a question of whether power exists in the area. It is a question of how far the line has to travel to reach you and who pays for that. The cost sits with the buyer, it scales with distance, and it is routinely left out of the arithmetic when people compare two plots on price per square foot.

The same applies to the approach road, drainage and any boundary wall. These are the costs that turn a cheap plot into an expensive one, and we set them out in total cost of ownership: NA versus agricultural land over ten years.

Take out the compass.

Which way does the slope run, and where will water go when it rains. Where does the sun rise, and which part of the plot will be shaded in the afternoon. Which direction does the wind come from in the monsoon, because that decides which side of a house takes the weather.

This is also the moment to check the view you are paying for. A view across somebody else's undeveloped land is a view with a shelf life. Ask what the neighbouring parcels are zoned for.

Overhead power lines across a plot restrict what you can build under them. A high-tension line is a serious constraint, and it is visible from the ground in about four seconds.

Then ask the harder question: what is coming. A new road, a rail line or an airport changes a market, sometimes for the better. Infrastructure is the main reason land near a city moves in price, and it is worth understanding before you buy rather than reading about it afterwards. Our piece on Karjat land price trends shows how a single rail project reshaped one market.

Walk to the edge of the plot and look in every direction.

A quarry, a poultry farm, a highway, a factory: all of these are audible or visible from the plot and none of them appear on the title documents. So is a temple with a loudspeaker, a school with a morning assembly, and a road that carries trucks at night.

Visit at a different hour if you can. A plot at eleven in the morning on a Sunday tells you very little about the same plot at seven on a Tuesday.

Talk to people who live nearby and are not part of the transaction.

Ask who owns this land. Ask if there has been any dispute. Ask what happens here in the monsoon. Three separate answers that agree are worth more than any assurance from the seller, and one answer that does not fit is the most valuable thing you will hear all day.

This is the single reason to bring somebody local. Not to negotiate: to have this conversation in the language people will answer honestly in.

Photograph the survey markers, the access road along its whole length, the boundaries, the drainage, the transformer, the neighbouring structures and anything that looked wrong.

Turn on location tagging. Months later, in another country, deciding between two plots you saw on the same trip, the photographs will run together and the coordinates will be the only thing that separates them. They also give your lawyer something concrete to work from.

The most useful output of a site visit is the list of things you did not resolve.

Nobody could show you the survey markers. The co-owner was not there. The access road crosses a field and nobody would say whose. Those are not failures of the visit, they are the visit doing its job. They become the questions your legal check has to answer before money moves, and they belong in writing on the day, not reconstructed from memory a fortnight later.

Send somebody with this list who is not connected to the sale. A local lawyer, a surveyor, or a friend who understands what they are looking at. Give them the record of rights and ask for photographs of each numbered item above.

If you are buying remotely, the person acting for you needs proper authority, which has its own requirements and its own risks. We cover them in power of attorney for overseas buyers.

What the visit cannot do is replace the document check. Title, encumbrance and the search of past transactions all happen on paper, through a lawyer, and the name and process for that search varies by state. Our step-by-step guide to buying a plot sets out the sequence, and the NRI documentation checklist covers what you will need to produce as a buyer.

A site visit is one hour that can save a decade of litigation, and most of what it catches is not written down anywhere. Go looking for the gap between the paper and the ground. If you want to walk a market before you commit to a plot in it, our Karjat micro-market map and current plot listings are a reasonable place to start, and a consultation is free if you would rather talk it through first.