The purchase is a document exercise
A viewing tells you about a building. It tells you nothing about whether the person showing you round can pass the land on cleanly, whether the boundary you walked is the boundary drawn on the plan, or whether the council has reserved part of the front garden against a road widening nobody has got round to yet.
Those answers live on paper. The paper sits in four separate places, with the seller, at the Land Registry, at the local authority for the area, and with a licensed surveyor. Purchases go wrong when those four disagree and nobody thought to lay them side by side.
So the order of work is the reverse of how it feels. See the property, by all means. Then stop, and read.
The file, and what each part of it proves
| Document | What it actually proves | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| The seller’s deed | How the current owner came to hold the land, and from whom | The seller; certified copies through the Land Registry |
| Registry extracts | What has been registered against the land, including mortgages and other instruments | The Land Registry, ordered through your notary |
| Survey plan | The boundaries and measured extent of the land on the ground | A licensed surveyor |
| Street line and building line certificate | How much frontage is reserved, and how close to the road you may build | The Pradeshiya Sabha, Urban Council or Municipal Council |
| Non-vesting certificate | That the land is not vested in the local authority or being sold over unpaid rates | The same local authority |
| Certificate of conformity | That a completed building was approved as it was actually built | The authority that approved the plans |
The list is not ours. LankaPropertyWeb’s own buying guide names the street line, building line and conformity certificates, sets a non-vesting and ownership certificate alongside them, and treats an approved survey plan as the baseline rather than an extra.
Check who is actually selling
The name on the deed and the person negotiating are not always the same, and they do not always have to be, a power of attorney, an executor, one co-owner speaking for a family. What matters is that whoever signs is entitled to sign, and that everybody who needs to does.
Section 2 of the Prevention of Frauds Ordinance sets the bar for the instrument itself. A land sale has no force unless the document is written, carries the signature of each person executing it, and is attested by a notary in front of two witnesses who are there together. Each person executing it is the part to hold on to. Where land is held by several people, a deed missing one of them becomes a problem you inherit.
That section reaches agreements to sell in future, not only the transfer itself. So the reassuring email, the signed offer letter and the handshake at the gate are worth precisely what they cost.
Extent is sold by the perch, so extent is money
Deeds describe how much land there is. Old deeds describe it loosely, and the phrase doing the work is “more or less”. That phrase is not decoration, it is the deed declining to commit to a number. When the deed and a fresh survey part company, believe the survey. It measured the ground; the deed only described it.
That is not a technicality, because everything is priced by the perch. One perch is 272.25 square feet, or 25.2929 square metres, and 160 of them make an acre. A block sold as twenty perches that surveys at eighteen and a half is not a rounding difference, it is seven and a half per cent of the purchase price, paid for land that does not exist.
Worth knowing too: the official units for land in Sri Lanka are metric, the square metre and the hectare, while perches, roods and acres are what deeds, agents and buyers actually use. Both turn up on documents in the same transaction, and the conversion between them is where arithmetic goes quietly wrong.
Ask for a plan that is recent and carries local authority approval. LankaPropertyWeb’s advice on buying land safely puts the threshold at less than ten years old and approved by the council. If the only plan in existence is the one attached to a deed from the 1970s, treat it as history rather than measurement, and have the parcel surveyed again before you price it.
What the local authority already holds against the land
Title can be immaculate and the plot still not be what you assumed. A street line marks where a road may be widened later. A building line sets how close to the centre of the road anything may be built. Both belong to the authority rather than to the owner, and neither appears in a deed.
Local authorities publish their own procedure. Galigamuwa Pradeshiya Sabha, for one, asks for an application form and a copy of the survey plan and states a turnaround of up to three days where street lines are already demarcated. Others differ, so ask the authority for that area rather than assuming a national rule.
The non-vesting certificate answers a narrower question, whether the land is vested in the local authority, or due to be sold off over unpaid assessment rates. It is a short document that occasionally saves an entire transaction.
An apartment is a different file altogether
Buying a unit rather than a plot changes what you are checking. LankaPropertyWeb’s guide puts the first apartment question plainly: whether the development is registered with the Condominium Management Authority, or holds a certificate of conformity where the building is finished. Neither is visible in a deed, and both are worth holding in writing before an advance moves.
If you are not a Sri Lankan citizen, condominium purchase carries statutory conditions of its own about how and when the money must arrive. That is governed by statute, Act No. 38 of 2014, the Land (Restrictions on Alienation) Act, and our guides to owning property as a foreigner set the conditions out.
The costs that land on the buyer
Stamp duty on a land sale is the buyer’s, at 4 per cent in all nine provinces, and it is assessed on whichever figure is larger, the consideration you agreed, or the Provincial Department of Revenue’s own assessment. It has to be settled before the deed can be registered.
The practical check, then, is not what the duty comes to on your offer. It is what the assessment says, because that is the figure capable of moving the bill. Ask your notary to confirm it before you fix a price. Notary fees and registration costs are separate again.
What the market figures do and do not tell you
There is no reason to compress this work, and the published figures do not supply one. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s condominium market data for the first quarter of 2026 records condominium sales volumes down 15.2 per cent, while its new condominium price index for Colombo District ran 18.5 per cent above a year earlier. Within the same quarter the movement by price band was uneven: transactions in the LKR 25–50 million band fell, while the 50–70 million and 75 million-and-above bands rose slightly.
Those figures point in different directions, and it is worth being clear about what none of them says. A volume figure counts completed sales; it is not a count of interested buyers. A price index tracks prices; it is not a measure of demand. So neither one tells you whether somebody is standing behind you at your offer, which is exactly the thing a seller in a hurry wants you to assume.
So ask. A seller with a genuinely competing offer can say so and evidence it. Urgency that cannot be evidenced is negotiating pressure rather than information, and the right answer to it is to finish the searches anyway.
Where our part stops
A1 can put this file together across the seven districts we cover, request the certificates, brief the surveyor, read the plan against the deed, and say plainly when the numbers do not reconcile. What we do not do is give the opinion on title. That is a notary’s or an attorney-at-law’s work, and it is the part of a purchase worth paying properly for.
If you have found something and want a second set of eyes on the paperwork, talk to us and instruct a notary early. In that order, and well before the advance.