Encumbrance Certificate for Bangalore Property: What Forms 15 and 16 Mean, and Ordering One on Kaveri
Ask a property lawyer in Bangalore what to check first, and the answer is usually the EC. The encumbrance certificate is the registration department's own account of every deed filed against a property in a given period. The answers below take a buyer from the basic idea through ordering the certificate on Kaveri to the limits that no certificate can overcome.
Why Is It Asked For in Every Purchase?
An EC tells a buyer whether the seller has already mortgaged the land, sold a part of it or promised it to somebody else through a registered agreement. It also traces the route by which the property came to the seller, which makes it useful beyond debts. A lender will not release a home loan until it has seen one.
Behind it is an index kept by sub-registrar offices. Each registration leads the office to enter the deed under the property involved, and the department of Stamps and Registration prints the extract the applicant asks for.
What Kinds of Deeds Are Listed?
Registered sales and agreements to sell are there, together with mortgages and the memoranda that record title deeds placed with a lender. When a mortgage ends, the release, reconveyance or discharge deed appears. The index also holds gifts, settlements, partitions and exchanges, registered leases, registered powers of attorney, and court decrees or attachment orders, if they were put through registration.
Because ownership changes are included, the name is slightly misleading. Read from the earliest row to the latest, the list works as a brief biography of the property.
Form 15 or Form 16: Which Is Which?
Two documents can come out of a search. The distinction is whether anything turned up.
| Format | When issued | What it contains | Usual name |
|---|---|---|---|
| Form 15 | At least one registered deed exists in the span | One row per deed: number, date, type, parties, value | The encumbrance certificate |
| Form 16 | Zero registered deeds in the span | A statement that none was found | The nil certificate |
Form 15 is entirely ordinary, because a property that changed hands, was mortgaged or was inherited during the period will have entries, among them the seller's purchase. The one that deserves questions is a Form 16 for years in which the seller says the property was bought.
The nil result is only as reliable as the description fed into the search. A search can miss deeds when the survey, site or boundary entries were keyed differently from the way they were written in the deeds. Check the schedule on the printed certificate against the sale deed.
How Many Years Should Be Searched?
Thirty years makes a full title search, whereas lenders in Karnataka frequently settle for 13. The start date should be no later than the oldest deed in the chain being examined, and the end date should be the current month. A certificate that closes last year knows nothing about a mortgage signed since.
Searches for long periods are usually made in two parts. Computerised records, which start in April 2004 for most offices, are available online. For earlier years, someone must search the hand-written registers held by the sub-registrar through a separate, slower application.
How Does Kaveri Handle the Application?
Kaveri, the department's portal, offers the EC online. The screens change now and then, but the work follows this order:
- Create an account with a phone number and an email ID.
- Choose the EC service, then the district, taluk, hobli and locality.
- Copy the boundaries, khata number, site or flat number and survey number as they appear in the deed.
- Enter the first and last date of the period to be searched.
- Study the entries displayed and ask for the copy bearing a digital signature.
- Pay the fee, which has an application part and a search part that grows with the period, and download the certificate when it arrives.
Lenders and lawyers accept only the signed copy. The version visible on screen has no signature and is good for a first look.
Land near the city often changes its description over time, passing from a survey number to a subdivided number, a layout site and finally a flat carrying an undivided share of the land. Search under each description the property has used, and ask the lawyer for another search under the names of owners.
How Should the Rows Be Read?
Every row speaks about one deed, and the useful columns give the property description, the dates of signing and registration, the kind and value of the deed, the executant and the claimant. A final column gives the document number, year and office of registration.
Move from the oldest row to the newest. The claimant in one sale deed should reappear as the executant in the next. A gap may reflect an inheritance, a partition or a deed that has gone missing, and the seller can be asked for the paper behind it.
Every mortgage should reappear as a release. Where a mortgage or deposit of title deeds is not followed by a release or discharge from the same lender, the loan may still be live. The seller must then bring the lender's no-dues letter and have the release registered ahead of the sale.
A registered agreement to sell made out to another person matters too. Unless a cancellation deed comes after it, that other person may still be able to claim a purchase. Only the document number is needed to get certified copies of the listed deeds.
What Remains Invisible?
The index knows only registered documents. It therefore misses suits pending in court, unless an order went through registration, and it misses agreements left unregistered, family arrangements and spoken partitions. It cannot show legal heirs omitted from a sale, notifications for land acquisition or road widening, arrears of tax, power or maintenance, or a building that differs from the plan.
Other sources cover these gaps. Court records cover suits, loans appear in the central mortgage registry, tax and khata records are with the civic body, and the plan is held by the planning authority. So the EC supplies one finding for a title report, and the others come from those sources.
When Should Each Copy Be Taken?
Three copies are standard. One comes from the seller before a token is paid, one is asked for separately by the lawyer acting for the buyer, and the last is a fresh copy in the registration week.
A copy taken once the sale is complete lists the deed now issued to the buyer. It supports the khata transfer, and it is the first paper a later buyer or lender will want. For a home bought with a loan, the lender's charge stays visible until a release entry is made.
Anyone with a question about a listed project's papers can write through the contact page. The team will say where the answer lies.
