NRI Property Services in KeralaBuy, protect, convert and sell — from anywhere

Yes. Under FEMA, a non-resident Indian or OCI cardholder can buy residential and commercial property in Kerala without any RBI permission, paying through an NRE/NRO account or inward remittance. Agricultural land, plantations and farmhouses cannot be bought by NRIs or OCIs — they can only be inherited or received as a gift from a resident relative — so a rubber estate or paddy land purchase must be structured differently.

Title verification and due diligence before purchase, transaction management through a registered Special Power of Attorney, land conversion (Form 5, 6, 7) and building-permit follow-up, encroachment and boundary disputes, tenant and lease management, property tax and mutation, inheritance and partition matters, and periodic inspection reports with photographs — all handled locally in Kerala on your behalf.

Only if you cannot attend registration in person. A Special Power of Attorney limited to the specific property and acts is safer than a General Power of Attorney. It should be executed before the Indian consulate (or notarised and apostilled), adjudicated and stamped in Kerala within the statutory period, and registered with the Sub-Registrar where property is being sold. We draft the PoA scope, arrange adjudication and act as, or supervise, the attorney holder.

Keep the boundaries physically marked and fenced, keep land tax paid in your own name every year, have the thandaper and survey records checked annually, register a caveat with the Sub-Registrar if you suspect fraud, and have someone inspect the property regularly. J Group runs scheduled inspections, pays taxes on your behalf, and acts immediately on encroachment through the Village Office, police and civil courts.

Yes. Inherited agricultural land can be held and sold by an NRI, but only to a person resident in India. Sale proceeds go to an NRO account and can be repatriated up to the USD 1 million per financial year limit with a chartered accountant’s Form 15CA/15CB certificate. If the land is paddy or wetland, its Data Bank status and any conversion history affect the price and the buyer pool.

The buyer must deduct TDS on the full sale consideration when the seller is an NRI (at the applicable long-term or short-term capital-gains rate plus surcharge and cess), unless a lower-deduction certificate is obtained from the Income Tax Department in advance. Capital gains tax, exemptions under Sections 54/54F/54EC and repatriation limits are handled by your chartered accountant; we coordinate the documents and timelines. This is general information, not tax advice.

Yes. The application is filed online through the Revenue eServices portal or an Akshaya centre, but site verification, hearings and document submissions need a local representative. We file and follow up Form 5, Form 6 and Form 7 applications for NRI owners and report status at each stage.

Most clients are in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. Everything runs on WhatsApp, email and video calls: documents are shared as scanned copies, site visits are done on video, and signatures are handled through the consulate or apostille route. Fees are agreed in writing before work starts.

Client documents — passport and OCI copies, Powers of Attorney, title deeds, tax receipts — are processed on air-gapped machines that never connect to the internet, using software J Group built in-house. Compressing scans to fit portal upload limits, which most people do on free websites, is done offline. The one step that has to be online is filing on the government portal itself. See /confidentiality.