Bhubaneswar, Sept. 13: The recently enforced Real Estate Regulation Act (Rera) has badly affected the city's real estate activities as none of the ongoing projects have been able to receive their registration numbers.

The state chapter of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Association of India (Credai) raised this point at a forum today. They said that despite applying before the stipulated date - July 31, none of their projects got the registration numbers, which made it difficult for them to sell the properties.

On May 1, the government enforced the Odisha Real Estate Regulation and Development Rules, 2017, and formed the Real Estate Regulatory Authority and the Real Estate Appellate Tribunal to facilitate the real estate sector of the state. According to the rules, residential and commercial real estate properties will have to be registered with the authority.

The ongoing projects that have not received completion certificate on the date of commencement of the act are supposed to register within three months. 'According to Rera, projects cannot be advertised or sold without the registration number. We had applied before the deadline, but haven't got the registration number,' said Credai president Binay Krishna Das.

He said the government had failed to sensitise about the act's modalities and enforced it arbitrarily, leading to confusion about the same among the real estate developers of the state. 'The registration process under Rera started at the end of deadline where many developers could not register their projects because of lack of information about rules,' he said.

The developers further said many states had simplified the process by receiving online forms and giving instant registration numbers of projec-ts. But here, applications were received manually without providing any assistance to them.

'The manual process is resulting in stopping of new business at the time when developer were anticipating some good news in the coming festive seasons after facing the hard period of recession and demonetisation,' said Credai chairman D.S. Tripathy,.

'We will look after the problems of the developers in registering their properties,' said a housing department official.