TRAI’s 7-day enquiry window: what it means for real estate calls

A buyer fills in the form on your project page on a Tuesday evening. Your team is busy with site visits all week and gets round to calling her the following Thursday. Until this year, that was slow but allowed. Under TRAI’s new rule, that call may no longer be covered by her enquiry.

If you run pre-sales for a developer or a brokerage, this is the rule that changes your follow-up plan the most. Here is what it says, how the days are counted, and what to do on day eight.

In short, since TRAI’s Third Amendment of September 2026, a buyer’s written or digital enquiry lets a business call them about it for seven days. After seven days the business needs another basis to call, such as an application, a purchase or consent registered with the telecom operators.

TRAI’s 7-day enquiry rule at a glance

What	The rule	Where it comes from
An enquiry	Commercial calls and messages are allowed for 7 days from the enquiry.	Third Amendment 2026, reg. 2(g)
Proof of the enquiry	It must be in writing or by digital means, and the business must keep it in a form that can be checked.	Third Amendment 2026, reg. 2(g)
An application	An application for a product or service allows 3 months.	Third Amendment 2026, reg. 2(g)
Calls made by software or an AI voice	They must be declared to the operator in advance, with the numbers they come from.	Third Amendment 2026, reg. 4
When it applies	The amendment is dated 18 September 2026. Most of it applies 30 days after it is published in the Gazette, and the declaration of automated calls after 60 days.	Third Amendment 2026, reg. 1(3)

What changed for enquiry calls

Before this amendment, an enquiry or an application from the last three months counted as a relationship with the customer. That gave pre-sales teams a long, comfortable runway. Now an enquiry counts for seven days and an application for three months.

TRAI’s draft of March 2026 went further and proposed to drop enquiries altogether. Its explanatory memorandum says some senders were treating claimed spoken enquiries as consent. After comments from the industry, TRAI kept enquiries but limited them to written or digital ones, kept on record, for at most seven days.

Some asked for 30 days. TRAI turned that down, because at the enquiry stage a customer has only shown interest.

Which property enquiries count?

TRAI doesn’t list channels. The test is the same for every source: the enquiry is written or digital, and you can show the record later.

For a real estate team, these usually leave a written or digital record:

A form on your website, with the time it was sent.
An enquiry from a property portal, forwarded with its time and source.
A lead form on Meta or Google ads.
A WhatsApp message or email from the buyer.

Keep the time, the source and what the buyer asked about. TRAI doesn’t mention missed calls. A missed call carries no written request, so we wouldn’t rely on one.

How the seven days are counted

The regulation counts back from the day the person receives the call. The enquiry has to fall within the seven days before it. TRAI hasn’t published a worked example, so here is the one we use.

Day	What happens
Day 0	A buyer fills in the form on your project page at 7:40 pm.
Days 0 to 7	You may call about that enquiry, inside calling hours.
Day 8	The enquiry no longer covers a call. You need an application, a purchase or registered consent.

The window from the example above. The enquiry arrives on day 0, and the last call it covers is on day 7.

Either side can end the relationship sooner. If the buyer asks you to stop, stop, whatever day it is.

What to do after day seven

Day eight isn’t the end of the conversation. It means the enquiry alone no longer carries the call. You have four ways forward.

Ask for consent while the window is open. Under the 2026 text, explicit consent is either confirmed with the person and recorded by the operators’ consent registrar, or taken in a verifiable way and then registered there. A tick box on your own form may not be enough on its own, so ask your operator what registering it takes.
An application, such as a booking form or a filled application, allows three months.
A purchase creates a relationship that lasts as long as the contract does.
A buyer can always call you back. The rules are about calls and messages you send.

Are AI calls covered by the 7-day rule?

Yes, and they carry one more duty. The same amendment defines an automated call as one started by an application, software or an automated platform without a person dialling, including calls in a recorded or artificial voice. Every business that makes such calls must tell its operator in advance, with the numbers it will use. Undeclared automated calls are treated as spam.

TRAI was asked to leave out calls where a live person is also on the line. It declined, because a network can’t tell a human voice from an artificial one. So an AI calling agent’s calls are declared calls, whoever pressed the button.

How Intend applies the window

Every AI call goes through one check before it is placed. For India, an enquiry allows calls for seven full days from the recorded time of the enquiry, and not after. In the example above, the last call could go out before 7:40 pm on day 7.
An enquiry with no record behind it doesn’t count.
The check also covers calling hours, the business’s DLT registration, the number of attempts and opt-outs. If anything is missing, the call doesn’t happen.
Opt-outs are honoured on every channel, so a buyer who says stop on WhatsApp isn’t called.

What to do this week

If you run pre-sales, look at your follow-up plan and move every call inside the first seven days. Then make sure each lead in your CRM carries the time and source of the enquiry, because that record is what makes the call allowed.

For a follow-up plan that fits inside the window, read the real estate pre-sales playbook. For the registration side, see Get ready for AI calling in India. And if you’d like the window kept for you on every call, that is what Intend for real estate developers does.

Sources

A plain summary of TRAI’s texts as of the date above, not legal advice. Questions: hello@tryintend.com.