Supreme Court: an agreement to sell conveys no title, and attracts stamp duty only on possession

The buyer in this case had rented the property for fifty years before the owner agreed, in 2009, to sell it to him. He kept paying rent and living there as a tenant even after signing the agreement to sell, and was later evicted in separate rent-control proceedings for non-payment. The question was whether that agreement counted as a deemed conveyance under the Andhra Pradesh Stamp Act, which applies only when possession is actually delivered under the agreement. The Supreme Court held it did not: staying on as a tenant is not the same as taking possession as a buyer, so the document remained an ordinary agreement to sell, not a stamped sale deed.

The lesson for a title check is not to read a tenant's continued occupation as proof a sale went through. An agreement to sell conveys no title by itself, and it only gets deemed-conveyance stamp treatment if possession genuinely passed to the buyer under that agreement, not merely continued from an earlier tenancy. Where a chain includes a sitting tenant who signed an agreement to sell, ask for the registered sale deed itself rather than treating years of occupancy as evidence the purchase closed.