If you have looked into buying a single floor anywhere in Pakistan, you have run into the Karachi story: portions and extra floors sealed, hundreds of structures demolished, sub-registrars instructed not to register transfers, dealers warned of arrest, and the courts backing the authorities. It is not a rumour and it is not exaggerated.
Anyone selling you a floor who does not raise this themselves is either unaware of it or hoping you are. So here it is.
What the Karachi crackdown was actually about
Almost all of it concerned buildings that were not approved to be what they became: a storey added to a two-storey building without permission, a house carved into portions with no sanction for the subdivision, extra floors run up on a plot approved for fewer. The illegality was in the construction and the subdivision, not in the idea of one family owning one floor.
The enforcement followed the same logic. Sealing, demolition and the instruction to sub-registrars were all aimed at the thing that should not have existed. Buyers of those portions were the people hurt by it, and frequently they had paid in full.
The question that actually decides it
Not “is selling a floor legal.” The question is: was this specific building approved, by the authority entitled to approve it, to be the building it is, before it was built and sold?
For Central Point that approval is held with the Tehsil Municipal Administration, and the reference, the date and the scan are published on the approval page so you can take them to the authority yourself. If that approval did not exist, everything else on this website would be decoration.
Where Punjab law actually stands
We are not going to tell you the law here is settled, because it is not.
Pakistan’s property law was built around plots, not around multiple owners of one structure. Buyers of apartments have historically held allotment or transfer instruments rather than independent title, and common areas — stairs, roof, parking — have often been left undefined. When that ambiguity has been tested, it has sometimes gone badly: in the One Constitution Avenue matter in Islamabad, buyers found their position did not survive the cancellation of the developer’s lease.
A condominium framework has been legislated for Islamabad Capital Territory, which is real progress — and it applies to Islamabad. It does not extend to Punjab. If anyone tells you a condominium law protects your purchase in Lahore, they are wrong, and you should treat everything else they have told you with the same caution.
What we do about that, given it is not settled
We cannot legislate. What we can do is remove the ambiguity that makes the unsettled law dangerous, in the documents themselves:
- The building is approved for what it is, by the authority with jurisdiction, before sale — R-01.
- The instrument each buyer receives is named and published, along with what it does not do — R-02.
- Every shared part is allocated in writing, with a cost-sharing ratio and a decision rule, before anybody buys — R-04.
- The transfer route for a resale is written down, including what we may not refuse — R-06.
- Our involvement ends at handover. There is no continuing lease, licence or management arrangement through which our future problems could become yours.
Check us rather than trust us
- Take the approval reference to the TMA office yourself, without us.
- Show the draft instrument to your own lawyer before you pay anything. Not ours. If a seller discourages this, that alone is your answer.
- Ask the sub-registrar’s office how a transfer of this instrument is handled, and whether they have registered one before.
- Ask your bank what they would lend against it. A lender’s credit team does this assessment for a living and they have no reason to flatter us.
The honest summary
Buying one floor is a legitimate arrangement when the building is approved and the paperwork is specific, and a serious risk when either is missing. The risk is real enough that most people selling floors would rather you did not think about it.
Our position is that you should think about it, now, with a lawyer, before you pay a rupee — and that if we cannot survive that scrutiny we do not deserve the sale.