A construction-linked plan sounds simple: the buyer pays as the building rises. Foundation done, a slab of money is due; tenth-floor slab cast, another; on possession, the last. The logic is clean and fair to everyone. Where it goes wrong is in the plumbing, which buyer owes what this month, whether the milestone that triggers the demand has actually been certified, whether you were even allowed to ask for that much yet, and whether the money lands where RERA says it must. Miss any of those and a demand letter stops being a routine collection and becomes a dispute.
What a demand letter actually is
A demand letter is the notice you send an allottee that the next installment is now due because a defined stage of construction has been reached. In a construction-linked plan, as opposed to a fixed time-linked plan, the trigger is physical progress, not the calendar. That is the buyer-friendly part, and it is also why it is easy to get wrong: the letter is only valid if the stage it names has genuinely been completed, and if the amount it asks for matches the payment schedule the buyer signed. A demand for a slab that is not yet cast, or for a percentage the agreement never mentioned, is exactly the kind of thing that ends up in front of a RERA authority.
RERA draws the first line: 10% and a registered agreement
Before any construction-linked demand goes out, one threshold matters more than the rest. Section 13 of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 says a promoter cannot accept more than 10% of the cost of the apartment as an advance or application fee without first entering into a written agreement for sale and registering it. In plain terms: you may take a booking amount up to 10%, but the moment you want more, the registered agreement has to exist. Skip it and you are not just being informal; Section 61 allows a penalty of up to 5% of the project cost. So the very first "demand" in any plan is really a sequence, booking within 10%, then a registered agreement for sale, then the milestone-linked demands that follow. Software that fires a 25% demand before the agreement is registered is walking a builder straight into a fine.
- The specific construction milestone reached, matched to the buyer's agreed payment plan.
- The exact amount due, computed from that milestone's percentage of the total consideration.
- Applicable GST on the installment, shown separately.
- The due date and the interest rate on delayed payment, as per the agreement.
- The RERA-designated account details, so the money lands where it is legally required to sit.
The leak is in the timing, not the arithmetic
Most builders can compute a demand. What they lose money on is timing and follow-through. A slab gets cast on the 3rd; the demand goes out on the 20th because someone was busy; the buyer pays on the 15th of the next month; nobody applied the delay interest the agreement allows; and across sixty units that slippage is weeks of working capital and lakhs in un-charged interest every quarter. Then there is the reconciliation: which demands are raised, which are part-paid, which co-buyer paid their half and which did not. A generic CRM tracks a "deal"; it does not track a unit through six milestones, two co-buyers, GST, and a delay-interest clock. So the tracking moves into Excel, and Excel does not send reminders.
Sell.Do, Zoho and LeadRat, named fairly
There are good tools in this market. Sell.Do is a capable, real-estate-specific CRM and marketing platform, and larger developers run their whole sales funnel on it, but its pricing, broadly in the tens of thousands of rupees a month, is built for that scale. Zoho is flexible and inexpensive, and plenty of builders bend it into shape, but it is a general CRM: the RERA agreement gate, the construction-linked demand engine, the co-buyer split, and the delay-interest clock are things you configure and maintain yourself. LeadRat and others do lead management well. The honest summary is that most of these are strongest at getting a lead to a booking. The part after booking, collections against milestones, is where a mid-market builder is usually left stitching things together.
The mid-market gap
If you are running one to three projects, you live in an awkward middle. Sell.Do-tier pricing is hard to justify for a couple of towers; a generic CRM leaves you doing the real-estate-specific work by hand. That gap, a builder too big for spreadsheets and too small for enterprise pricing, is the customer we built for.
How BizRevolt runs demand letters
In BizRevolt a unit is the object, not a deal. Each unit carries its buyer or co-buyers, its payment plan, and its milestone schedule. When a construction stage is marked complete, the system raises the correct demand for every unit tied to that stage, computes the amount and GST, splits it across co-buyers in their agreed ratio, and applies delay interest automatically if payment slips. It will not let a demand cross the 10% line until the registered agreement is recorded against the unit. Collections reconcile against the RERA-designated account, and you can see, per project, exactly what has been demanded, received, and is overdue, without opening a spreadsheet.
- Milestone-triggered demand letters raised for every affected unit at once, not one at a time by hand.
- Co-buyer part-payment split handled in the agreed ratio and tracked to each person.
- A hard stop on demanding past 10% until the registered agreement for sale exists.
- Delay interest applied automatically, with a live per-project view of demanded versus received.
Sales gets you the booking. Collections is where the project actually gets built.
We are not trying to replace the CRM that fills your sales gallery. We are trying to fix the quieter half of the business, the milestone-to-money half that decides whether the tower gets funded on time. BizRevolt is priced per user, at Rs 999, Rs 1,599 and Rs 2,499, so a three-project builder can run it without an enterprise budget. If you want to see it against your own payment plan, message me on WhatsApp or call +91 91 0657 4865 and I will walk a real demand schedule through it with you.
Image credits: Moheen Reeyad (cover) and Wistula (in-body), both CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.