Before You Buy: ten questions worth asking before you pay the advance.

A property is a twenty-year decision dressed up as a one-day signature. By the time the advance has cleared, every meaningful Vastu mistake has already been locked in — the entrance is where it is, the bedrooms face what they face, the slope drains where it drains. After possession, you will spend money rearranging furniture and breaking soft walls to soften the parts that did not have to be wrong in the first place.

The ten days before the advance, by contrast, are when nothing is locked in yet. You can still walk away from the wrong flat. You can still pick the better one out of three on your shortlist. You can still negotiate harder on the one with the south-west extension because you now know what it will cost to live with. Every rupee of attention spent here pays back ten times over the lifetime of the home.

What follows is the same first-pass framework Rohit Khandelwal uses inside every Selection Path · Disha report he writes — laid out so you can use the cheaper version yourself, on as many candidate properties as you want.

Stand at the front door, look outward, read the compass. The direction you are facing is the property’s facing direction — and it is the single most influential placement in Vastu. North, East, North-East, and West facings are broadly favourable. South, South-West, North-West, and South-East facings are workable but ask harder questions of the rest of the layout. If the seller’s brochure does not match what your compass says, trust the compass.

A regular rectangle or a square is the friendliest start. A plot or floor plate that narrows from front to back (gaumukhi — “cow-faced”) is favoured for residential use. The reverse — wide at the front, narrow at the back (shermukhi — “lion-faced”) — is favoured for commerce, less so for a home. Triangular plots and plots with cuts at the north-east or extensions at the south-west deserve a careful second look before you commit.

Walk the perimeter on a wet morning if you can. Land that slopes gently toward the north-east is the classical ideal because that is the direction water ought to drain. Land that slopes toward the south-west — the reverse — is the single most common slope-related concern, and one that is genuinely expensive to remediate after possession.

The kitchen carries fire energy. Its classical zone is the south-east; the north-west works as a secondary. A kitchen in the north-east, the south-west, or directly opposite the main door is worth a closer look — not because it cannot be lived with, but because the cost of living with it is real and worth pricing in.

The earning member’s bedroom in the south-west supports stability. In the north-east it pulls against it. Children’s bedrooms are gentlest in the west or north-west. Guest rooms are flexible. Pay attention to where the heads of the beds point — the standard rule is to sleep with the head toward the south or east; sleeping with the head pointing north is the placement most often flagged.

Toilets in the north-east, the centre of the home (brahmasthan), or directly opposite the kitchen are the three placements most often flagged in our reports. They can be remediated — but the remediation is plumbing work, not paint, and the cost compounds across years. Better to know going in than to discover after.

The north-east is the classical zone. North-east-of-east and east work as next-best options. A pooja niche in the south, the south-west, or under a staircase is the single most common avoidable misplacement — it costs nothing to fix at the design stage and is awkward to fix later.

The geometric centre of a home is the brahmasthan — classically left open, lit, and uncluttered. A toilet, a kitchen, a heavy structural column, or a staircase landing in the brahmasthan is a recurring concern in our reports. Walk to the centre of the floor plate. What is there?

The neighbours your property has cannot be moved later. A tall building cutting your north-east light, a temple or a transformer at the wrong corner, a road T-junction pointing into your front door, a graveyard or a hospital across the road — these are external influences classical Vastu takes seriously, and they are all things you can verify in twenty minutes by walking around the block.

Vastu is one of five parallel checks every serious buyer must run. The other four — Legal title and approvals, Technical structure and quality, Financial loan and documentation, Ethical seller and provenance — are not Vastu, but they are not optional either. If any of those four come back with a red flag, the Vastu read does not matter yet. Spend the money on a property lawyer and a structural engineer first; bring us in when the property has cleared their checks and you want a second-pass eye on the layer they cannot see.

Every serious property buyer runs five parallel checks before they sign. We call this the 5-Point Due Diligence frame, and it is how we think about every property that comes through our Selection Path · Disha reports.

A great Vastu score does not redeem a property with a clouded title; a weak Vastu score does not damn a property the other four checks endorse. The frame is exactly how we structure a Clarity Call when a buyer brings us a candidate property — we walk through all five layers, not just ours, and help you sequence the decisions in the order they actually matter.