The weeks before a launch are the most valuable marketing period a project has, and the most commonly wasted.
Wasted in two directions. Some developers do nothing until approvals are in hand and then expect a cold market to respond to a launch announcement. Others say too much, too early, and spend the launch correcting expectations they created themselves.
There is a middle path and it is mostly about being careful with what you promise.
What can you legally say before RERA registration?
Less than most marketing wants to say, and this is not a grey area worth testing.
Under RERA, a project that is not registered cannot be advertised, marketed, booked, sold or offered for sale. That covers a lot more than a hoarding. It covers digital advertising, brochures, and collecting bookings.
What you generally can do is build interest in something that is not yet an offer to sell. Talk about the location. Talk about the developer, the completed projects, the team. Invite people to register for information when it becomes available.
The distinction that matters: you are collecting people who want to be told, not selling units. The moment your pre-launch page carries prices, unit sizes and a booking amount, you are advertising an unregistered project.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Have your legal team sign off on the words before anything runs. But the shape of what is safe is well understood and your counsel will confirm it in one reading.
What is pre-launch actually for?
Building a list of people you can call on day one.
The single biggest advantage a launch can have is not needing to start from cold. If you open with four hundred people who have already raised their hand, your first fortnight looks completely different, and your cost per booking for that cohort is a fraction of what it will be later.
That list is the asset. Everything in pre-launch should be judged on whether it builds it.
What should the pre-launch page contain?
Enough to be worth registering for and not so much that it becomes an offer.
The location, honestly. Not the marketing name of the micro market, the actual place, with the distances that decide a purchase. This is the single strongest filter available to you and it costs nothing.
The developer. Completed projects, with names and handover dates. This is where credibility comes from before there is a product to judge.
The category and rough positioning. Whether this is compact apartments, larger family homes, plots, villas. People need to know if it is for them.
What registering gets you. First information, first access, and whether that means anything concrete.
No prices. No unit sizes. No booking amount. Those arrive at launch.
How do I build a list without a price?
By being specific about everything except the price.
A page that says premium residences coming soon in a prime location collects almost nobody, because it has not told anyone anything they can act on. A page that names the road, names the developer, lists four completed projects, says three and four bedroom homes, and says pricing will be shared with registered interest in November, collects a real list.
The specificity does the work. Price is one fact among many, and its absence matters far less than people assume when everything else is concrete.
Should I be running paid ads in pre-launch?
Yes, at a modest level, and with a different purpose from launch advertising.
Pre-launch advertising is buying a list. That means you are optimising for cost per registration, judged against how many of those convert to site visits later, which you will not know for months. So keep the spend controlled and the targeting tight rather than trying to reach everyone.
It also does something less obvious that is worth the money on its own. It tells you which messages people respond to before you have committed to a positioning. Two weeks of pre-launch advertising is the cheapest market research available, and it is real behaviour rather than opinion.
What is the most common pre-launch mistake?
Promising a launch date and then moving it.
Approvals slip. Everyone in the industry knows approvals slip. But a list built on “launching in September” that hears nothing in September, October and November is a list that has stopped believing you before you have sold anything.
Say the quarter rather than the date. Then write to the list even when there is no news, because silence is what kills a pre-launch list, and a short honest update costs nothing and keeps the asset alive.
What should I have ready on launch day?
The list, warmed and expecting to hear from you.
The offer settled, in one sentence.
The sales team briefed on what the list has already been told, so nobody contradicts three months of messaging on the first call.
And the first hour of lead response owned by someone by name. A launch generates the highest quality enquiries the project will ever see. Losing them to a slow callback is the most expensive mistake available.
We build pre-launch registration and the launch campaign as one piece of work, because a launch that starts from cold is paying twice for the same buyers. Tell us what you are working on.
