What should you check before reserving a unit?

A reservation fee is usually modest relative to the purchase, which is precisely what makes it easy to pay before you are ready. It takes the unit off the market, starts a clock on your side, and creates a sunk cost that will quietly influence every decision you make afterwards. Treat it as the commitment it is.

Confirm the title. Establish what is being sold: freehold, leasehold, or a sectional interest, and how many years remain if it is leased. Ask for the parent title and confirm the development has the approvals to subdivide it. A search is inexpensive and it is the single most useful thing you can do before paying anything.

Read the reservation terms, not the summary. Is the fee refundable, and for how long? Does it come off the purchase price or sit on top of it? What happens if your financing does not come through? A reservation that converts to a deposit on signature is a different instrument from one that is simply forfeited.

Establish the unit, not the unit type. Reserve a specific floor and a specific stack. A two-bedroom on a high floor is not a unit. Get the floor plan for the actual apartment, with its own dimensions and its own aspect, and check where the sun sits on it in the afternoon.

Understand the financing before you commit to the timetable. If a bank is involved, know what it will lend against an off-plan purchase in this development specifically — some will not lend until completion. The payment schedule and the mortgage drawdown have to agree with each other, and it is far easier to discover that they do not before the clock starts.

Ask what has already sold. Not the percentage — which floors and which stacks. A scheme where the best aspects have gone tells you something about what remains, and about how the pricing was set.

If a reservation is being pressed on you on the grounds that the unit will not be there tomorrow, that is a reason to slow down rather than to sign. Well-run developments do not need to rush buyers, and the good ones do not.