Parampara and Prathishta in Indian Rental Market

Random Business Ideas #01

To all the single ladies out there,

I know you all hustle,

you earn,

you are independent,

and nothing is impossible for you

Ummm…except for one thing.

Getting a place for rent! The same goes for couples as well.

Oh, yes! How many places have you hunted so that you could move in and create a little world of yours that you have always dreamt of? This number would be almost as the same as the number of times you have been refused an apartment or house for rent, irrespective of the city. It has been a dream of mine to move into a city for work where I could rent a place for myself and experience the feeling of living independently. But, I realised this is pretty much of a far-fetched fantasy unless I decide to buy an apartment taking the burden of a hefty housing loan.

'Society', the word that has been haunting us and is almost an antonym for the word 'freedom' for anyone who wants to lead their life unconventionally. But in this case, when I say society, I mean the 'Society' that every apartment complex has who decides whether you should live there or not.

Now let's look at the legal side of this.

The Co-operative Societies Act is a Central Act that provides specific guidelines for a society to be registered with the municipal corporations, its governance structures, common area maintenance rights, dos & don'ts. The Act also offers a degree of flexibility to societies to add regulations of their own. This loophole in the bye-laws is why the 'Society' has the right to refuse you from getting a rental on your terms. In most cases, the housing society can even overrule the flat owner's decision. Although it can be challenged in the court if it infringes on the fundamental rights of an individual, which is, honestly, a long shot.

Every Indian citizen has the right to reside anywhere in the country and discrimination is not allowed based on religion, caste, sex, eating habits or marital status and the tenant can challenge the decision of the housing society if he/she thinks the decision is biased. With that said, the reality is always the other way around, where the owner and the housing society are on one side and your 'single' self on the other side. It is almost as if the housing situation in India is designed to leave you with no other choice but to get married!

Home-solutions firms like Nestaway, NoBroker have a lot of options on their websites, but when it comes closer to sealing the deal with the property owner, all the frowning and cribbing starts to happen. If I had to pick one from the long list of refusals, the time when I was refused the rental the day I reached the place with all my luggage to move in because I was a working unmarried woman, would top my list with 5 golden stars. (This is just the residential rental refusals list, let's not even talk about office rentals for small startups.)

'Zolo Stays is the closest thing that couples and single ladies could look out for, as an option. But this is in turn a shared apartment situation and has limited choices for couples. It is better than all the other options which are out there, though. In 2016, Nestaway launched 'Nestaway Couples' as a marketing gimmick for April Fool's day. It is indeed an accurate representation of the reality that, rentals for unmarried couples is a joke! A big one.

Takeaways

My key takeaway from the experiences that I had, and the research that I have done, is that the rental market for unmarried couples/live-in couples and single ladies is an untapped avenue. There are companies like StayUncle and Airbnb which allows you to find hassle-free accommodations for both the above-mentioned user groups. But the rental situation for these groups has not been solved properly to date. This is in turn because we have the glorious complications of parampara, pratishtha and all of that, but it can be a groundbreaking extension to any of the big real estate players out there.

The number of single women in the country as per the available census data is around 71.4 million, and that is around a decade back. This includes widows, divorcees, unmarried women, and women who are separated from their husbands. Also, as per the 2019 research report published by the Statista Research Department, there are 250 million couples across the country. These numbers state that these two user groups are a growing tribe in India, and singling them out in the real estate sector while all the other sectors are tapping into their market potential to cater to their needs is just ignorance. It is only a matter of time until the mindset of the rental market in India will be forced to change. So it is a game of the fastest fingers first.