Real estate sales guide
A unit leaves the market when it is booked. Before that, every hold needs a clock.
A developer's sales desk needs five things from its CRM. Each enquiry tagged by source. A few stages, with an age on each card. Site visits written down. Holds that expire on a clock. And a unit that leaves the market only on a booking, carrying its RERA carpet area, its GST rate and its construction-linked demand schedule.
Last reviewed 13 October 2026.
Where the leads come from, and why source is a field
The source decides what happens next, what the enquiry is worth, and who gets paid on it.
Whatever the channel, each enquiry should land in one watched queue. One queue a person works through beats six half-watched ones, even when someone copies enquiries into it by hand.
Portals
High volume, low intent, decays in hours. Needs an owner in seconds and a call the same day, which is a different service level from a walk-in.
Walk-ins and hoardings
Already at the location and already interested. Log them at the site, before the visitor leaves. The follow-up window is that evening, and a register typed up at night misses it.
Channel partners
The enquiry should carry the channel partner's name, so the brokerage on the eventual booking and the tax deducted on it come from one record. Two spreadsheets will disagree at quarter end.
The NRI desk
Separate because the next step is not a site visit. It is a video walkthrough in their evening, documents attested differently, and payment from an NRE or NRO account. In the general queue these go quiet.
Six stages, and what each one is for
Rename them to match how your team talks. What matters is that a card cannot sit between two of them.
New enquiry
Captured, de-duplicated on phone number, assigned by rule. The measure is time to first contact in minutes, and it is the one pipeline number a developer can improve this week.
Qualified
Budget, configuration, timeline, and whether they are buying to live in or to let. A two-bedroom enquiry against four-bedroom inventory should be closed politely this week.
Site visit scheduled
A date, a time, and the person meeting them. This is where the pipeline leaks most, because a visit agreed on a call and never written down does not happen.
Site visit done
What they saw, which unit they liked, and the objection they raised. The objection is the field everyone skips and the one that decides the next call.
Negotiation
Price, payment plan, and the specific concession being argued about. A hold usually starts here, which is where the clock begins to matter.
Booked
The unit changes state and leaves availability. Everything after this is collections against the demand schedule.
Holds, bookings, and the race two salespeople will eventually run
Why a hold needs an expiry, why only a booking removes a unit, and what attaches to a unit at booking.
A hold should name a buyer and carry an expiry time, written down where both salespeople can see it. Expired holds should be released automatically, because a hold that lapsed on Friday and still reads as held on Monday is a flat you could have sold over the weekend.
A hold creates no obligation and should leave the unit on the market. Only a booking takes it off, and a second booking attempt on the same unit should be refused with the unit named rather than accepted by a screen that had not refreshed. Two salespeople on two phones in two corners of the office is an ordinary Saturday, and the most expensive mistake a spreadsheet-run sales team makes.
After the booking come the allotment letter and the agreement for sale. Section 13 of the Act bars the promoter from taking more than 10% of the cost as an advance or application fee before that agreement is registered.
Held, blocked and booked also mean three different things to a lender and to a board, and collapsing them into unsold is how a healthy project reads as a failing one.
A booking is also the moment two other regimes attach to the unit, and both measure it in carpet area as defined by section 2(k) of the Act: net usable floor area, excluding external walls, service shafts, the exclusive balcony and the exclusive open terrace, but including internal partition walls. Section 11(3) requires the sanctioned and layout plans with approved specifications, and the stage-wise time schedule of completion, to be made available to the allottee at the time of booking. And GST law sets the rate at booking: 1% without input tax credit if the unit is an affordable residential apartment (carpet area within 60 m² in a metropolitan city or 90 m² elsewhere, and gross amount charged not more than ₹45 lakh, both limits at once), and 5% without credit otherwise, for projects started on or after 1 April 2019. Both rates already allow for land by a one-third deduction, and neither changed on 22 September 2025. A flat measured generously in a brochure and precisely in a return is not the same flat, and the gap between the two is a rate difference on every instalment.
Site visits, because the ratio is the whole business
Enquiries are cheap to count and predict little. Visits cost money, and they predict bookings.
- A source producing 300 enquiries and 4 visits and a source producing 40 enquiries and 22 visits cannot be compared on enquiry counts. Measure conversion on visits.
- Record the unit shown against the visit, so a configuration shown constantly and never booked becomes pricing information months before a quarterly review.
Construction-linked demands
A construction-linked plan (CLP) raises the demand letter when a stage is certified on site. The third column is what happens when the trigger is a person remembering.
| Trigger | What is raised | What goes wrong without it |
|---|---|---|
| Booking | Booking amount | Collected but never recorded against the unit's schedule |
| Agreement and registration | The agreement instalment | The agreement for sale is registered with money outstanding, and it goes unnoticed for a quarter |
| Each slab certified | One instalment per slab | Twelve slabs and eleven demands is a gap found at handover |
| Possession offered | Final instalment and dues | Keys handed over against an unreconciled balance |
RERA, absorption, and the numbers a board asks for
What the sales and collections records have to hold so that the quarterly filing and the board pack agree.
- The RERA registration number belongs on the project and on every document where the state rules require it. Filing is done by a person on the state authority's portal, and what that person has to assemble each quarter is set out in a separate guide.
- Delay interest is symmetric under the Act: the rate you charge a late buyer is the rate you owe a buyer you delayed. Compare the agreement rate against it, because only one of the two survives a dispute.
- 70% of collections belong in the designated account. Keep collection data in a shape you can reconcile each transfer against.
- Lead the land record with what can stop a project rather than with what it cost: occupancy-certificate risk first, and a gap in the chain of title shown as a gap. Section 11(1)(c) makes approvals still pending after the commencement certificate a quarterly public disclosure, so the risk will be visible whether or not you track it.
- Contractor running-account bills are best computed cumulatively against measured quantities and paid as the difference from the previous bill, with retention held and variations recorded. That cost ledger is what an engineer certifies from, and a certificate assembled from bills in a drawer is why a withdrawal against the designated account is late.
- Absorption should exclude units that were never on the market. A 240-unit project with 40 held for promoters and 120 sold is 60% absorbed, not 50%, and that difference is a whole conversation with a lender.
What developers ask first
Two questions that come up before any CRM is chosen.
Our sales team lives on WhatsApp. Will they use a CRM?
Only if it is faster than what they do now, on a phone, standing at a site. Start small: capture, assign, log the visit, set the next date. Add reporting after people are in it daily, never before.
Can we run four projects in one CRM?
You can, with inventory, demands and absorption kept per project and one pipeline your team works from. Each project has its own RERA registration and its own designated account, so keep them separate in the records even when the sales team is shared.
How Ordence runs this for developers
The real estate pack, in the order the work happens. A developer uses it today for enquiries, site visits and follow-ups; bookings and demands are built, and no developer runs them yet.
- Enquiry to booking. Enquiries by source, site visits, cost sheets, bookings and cancellations, with each channel partner and its brokerage on the same record.
- Unit status. Projects, towers, units and plots, from available to booked to possession.
- Demands and collections. Demands raised once the stage they hang on is measured on site, each carrying GST at the rate your team sets for the booking with the place of supply at the property, and that GST reversed by credit note if the booking is cancelled before the section 34 deadline. The buyer's 1% TDS on a price of ₹50 lakh or more (section 194-IA until 31 March 2026, section 393 of the Income-tax Act 2025 since) is recorded on the receipt as income-tax TDS. A late instalment is followed up in order: reminder, first notice, final notice, cancellation warning, with interest on delayed payment shown period by period.
- RERA designated account. The 70% split of every realisation and withdrawals against the three certificates, kept per project.
- Contractors and cost. Contractor RA bills, BOQ, variations and works contracts, set against each project's cost sheet.
In practice: sales, accounts and site quote one number for units sold and one for money collected. Ordence does not decide whether a unit is affordable for GST; your team sets the rate, on your CA's advice.