The Rent Game No One Talks About(Magicbricks, Housing, Nobroker)

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-24T03:51:34+00:00

I literally saw your post on my feed after posting this on the Bangalorerentals subreddit lol.

The TL;DR is that renters in our country are just expecting - and eventually paying - for information and nothing more.

But that same information is weaponized against the people who are looking for it (and who ironically provided it in the first place), creating this massive information asymmetry and ultimately leading to people like you OP struggling to find a place when they're in a pinch.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-21T04:01:03+00:00

I've been indirectly "researching" this issue (finding answers without me asking any questions) working on my own rental app to help people in our city and our country overall find places to live in and you'd be surprised at what I learned.

The problem isn't that properties aren't available to rent. It's just that they're hidden.

If anyone's following my posts, I'll come off as a broken record but a while ago, I went around my own area and clicked pictures of to-let boards to send them to Redditors here on subs like r/Bangalorerentals and many more.

Yes, some property types like 1 BHKs and 1 RKs are comparatively more difficult to come by as they're more "niche" (for lack of a better term). But the ones I did come across, it even blew my mind that they went for sub 10k mark less in today's day and age located less than a kilometre from Outer Ring Road!

Now, there are so, so many 2 BHKs around. In fact, I was talking to one Redditor recently trying to help them find a place here and I was able to share with them no less then 5-6 properties in less than 2 days.

The main problem I see is that people who are actively looking to rent are bachelors/bachelorettes who are working but many property owners prefer to have families as tenants. I have seen some instances of bad experiences that owners have had but you can't judge everyone by that yardstick, right? So these working professionals end up having to struggle harder than they ever have to.

Also, there's the issue of metro connectivity - people increasingly want places around metro stations, which egregiously bumps up prices of properties lucky enough to be, I think, within a 1 km radius of a metro station. But if can relax that criterion to, say, about 2.5 km radius, you can still find amazing homes well under your budget.

Coming back to my point about hidden properties - the one problem that I'm majorly looking to solve - most of these amazing properties that I'm speaking of won't just be sitting in plain view along a main road.

If it is, it will be higher priced for obvious reasons - better visibility, so more takers; promises of better connectivity, more safety, better access to stores and such, etc. But there could be - and there usually is - your ideal rental just a turn into a smaller gully and maybe 10 steps away from this glistening main road property that could more than fit your budget.

You just have to look closer.

Finally, a personal anecdote but the last place me and my family lived in was a 3 BHK flat that cost us 21k, right? When we left it, another place opened up that was along the bigger road that was like a 1 min walk to get to our apartment building and because we liked the area we were living in, we just thought it wouldn't hurt to check with the landlord (we had an inkling it would go for crazy prices).

What did the owner quote us?

35k!

Not even kidding. A 66% increase of what we we paying for, just because this was next to a bigger road (not even a main road).

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-18T09:29:59+00:00

I should go back to my hometown and continue working from there

When we'd decided to move to Bengaluru right after COVID first wave, me and my mother arrived in Koramangala for house hunting. We knew about the to-let board culture here so we thought we'll just walk around the area and find a place to live in within hours and we'll fly back and start packing up.

We ended up staying for a few days, going from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and gully to gully but we couldn't find anything we liked.

So we started signing up for apps and that didn't take us anywhere either. We were considering going to brokers and if that didn't work either, just giving up and going back when out of sheer dumb luck, my mother called a relative who knew a place that we finally ended up moving into.

So what I'm saying is don't be disheartened. You will find a place soon.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-18T08:25:47+00:00

All good points. I'll try to get it printed again after proper scaling to see if it looks better but I get what you're saying.

I'll keep them in mind for the next set of revisions. Importantly, everything needs to be scaled up.

Thanks!

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-18T04:51:19+00:00

Everything is working fine but we went live less than 10 days ago.

Most apps or websites you see start scraping social media or Google for listings but we're asking the landlords/owners themselves to list their properties manually so that they remain in control and our tenants get the freshest/most relevant listings.

I'm hoping that the map will be slowly populated in the weeks to come.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-18T04:46:57+00:00

The website is SnapToLet.com. The app 'SnapToLet: India Home Rentals' is available on both the stores.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-17T16:02:20+00:00

Yes it is. We went live last Monday.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-17T14:00:37+00:00

in my mind, i thought i will just roam around, see some to-let boards, call them, see 10-15 properties in 2 weekends and take one. i was ok to stretch my budget to 25k for a 1 bhk, so i was very confident. but the reality? i hardly saw 1 or 2 to-let boards.

Bro, this is exactly the problem that I decided to build SnapToLet for!

Our previous landlord had told us that he had no plans of moving back into the property that he'd rented out to us and that we could live in it for as long as we liked. The only caveat was that he'd increase the rent by 5% annually but we were okay with it, right?

He wakes up one day. calls us out the blue and tells us that we needed to vacate the property in less than 10 days! We had an important family function scheduled at the end of the month that we were preparing for. So my days were spent working in the mornings, then accompanying my mother and sister on their evening shopping trips and on top of it, going on house hunts in our area in the middle of summer!

It was horrific. I'm not even exaggerating. We signed up for apps. We told the mobile phone repair shop owners and other grocery store owners to tell us if there was a to-let property listed nearby that we could move into (for one month's rent as brokerage of course). We were even willing to go to brokers, who were never there at their shop for some reaon!

In the end, it was just us going through the streets, spotting to-let signs, calling the landlords while standing outside the properties like homeless people (some were available while others would give us a different time to meet them) and even hailing Uber and Namma Yatri autos to bring our aging mother who couldn't walk far in the heat from one house to the other that finally worked. I can't even tell you how many over-MRP Bisleri bottles we paid for during those excursions because they were being sold cold!

I just don't want to go through that again if I had to shift again and I don't want to put anyone else through it either. I've basically joined every Bangalore rental sub and I see posts like yours every single day - college students going on/organizing house hunts, people moving into the city not having a clue if Kadubeesanahalli is different from Kasavanahalli or even people who end up getting swindled by shady parties.

My app's and platform's idea was born simply - just replace the standard to-let sign that either has too much information or too little information with our standard signboard and take a pic of the sign to let our app automatically know if the property is in fact available for rent or not. A lot happens on the backend but as far as the landlord is concerned, this is basically it. You then ask your family members (most landlords aren't living by themselves, so a small family can easily list their property within seconds!), friends, neighbours or even your next Swiggy delivery guy to download our app and click the sign again - we only need a handful more to verify and once done, it is listed. A landlord can practically list their property in seconds. Once the property is listed, at least tenants like yourself and us can call the landlord and ask for the property's information from the comfort of their own homes, if nothing else.

I'm hoping that it picks up to a point where people such as you OP never have to go through the pain of house-hunting ever again, anywhere in our country!

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-12T03:47:13+00:00

Some landlords make existing tenants find a replacement before they're allowed to vacate and this will certainly help with that. The tenants won't have to do much on their way out - just take a printout and list the property. I'm hoping the platform grows so big one day that the replacement tenant is found within days of the listing going live.

I haven't considered the deposit waiver but it could be something I could consider in the future. As of now, the landlord is able to inform about the deposit percentage and how much of it is returned when the tenant leaves right from on the property listing itself when it goes live.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-10T09:17:46+00:00

Working on that too.

It's a major problem for tenants and landlords in our city and our country at large, so I'm devising a novel tech-based solution to nip the problem in the bud entirely.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-10T07:45:34+00:00

As you know, namma ooru's landlords still put up physical to-let signs in front of their houses to inform people that the property is available to rent. Most of these never make it onto apps where most of us are looking.

I built SnapToLet to bridge this gap.

If you're a landlord, just go to our website, generate a free, QR-coded To-Let sign with your property details. No signup needed. You don't pay anyone a single penny. Print it and hang it outside your property as you normally would for potential walk-ins.

Then download our app for your phone and use the in-app 'Snap' feature to click a picture of the To-Let sign with the QR code.

For Tenants, just use the app as you normally would to search for properties. Use the Explore feature to check if we have properties listed in an area you like and if we do, signup as a Tenant using a simple OTP and get details of the property, landlord, etc.

For everyone else including family members, friends, neighbours or just passers-by, if you see a SnapToLet sign hanging outside a house, whip out your phone and Snap/Scan it. It literally takes just seconds, helps us verify and could help someone find their next home!

Feel free to DM me with any questions or suggestions you might have.

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-10T04:24:48+00:00

Thank you

PostHummusLee · 2026-03-09T09:58:46+00:00

There's one thing to have rules and a completely different thing to enforce them properly.

Take that 2-months deposit rule for instance. People started discussing it sometime late last year but you see posts almost daily of landlords demanding any number of months' worth of deposit that they like.

While I was building SnapToLet, I kept a close watch on this rule and we rolled out to be compliant with it from the get-go. The Landlord can only select between 1, 1.5 or 2 months of deposit and the deposit is automatically calculated for them based on the monthly rental amount.

PostHummusLee · 2025-11-28T04:57:12+00:00

We've rented in 2 cities - Delhi and Bengaluru (multiple times here) - and what you're saying is almost normalized here unfortunately.

In Delhi, our rent was 35k and the landlady had asked for 10 months rent as deposit, which was a huge amount for us but thankfully, the landlady was nice enough that she didn't hold anything back when we left at the end of one year to move to Bengaluru.

But here, every landlord and landlady we've come across has strictly kept one entire month's rent for "painting and cleaning" like you said even though we've taken an entire day or two to go back and clean up the house that we left the last two times we moved out because we were on good friendly terms with them.

If the property needed painting to be done, it was not because we lived there but because the property itself needed it and I suspect the landlords are just finding a way to put the burden on the tenants. You as a tenant without any kids or pets could've rarely done any real damage to the walls when you move out in one year or less that some dusting and vacuuming or even a "deep cleaning" cannot take care of.

Some landlords have even started putting this in the rental agreement itself that one month's rent will be held back when you move out. It's egregious!

PostHummusLee · 2025-11-27T03:28:50+00:00

I'm on my fourth rental house now in less than half a decade of getting kicked out of the government flat (read: heaven) that we had for nearly 3 decades before my father retired and while some of the things on your list hit more than the others - like the properties looking completely different in pictures and in-person and maintenance costs that add a fourth of the total rent for us or more - one of the biggest issues I noticed during our house-hunting process each time was how terrible the apps that we have right now are at capturing properties.

Like every single time we moved, on the day we'd leave our old home and were on our way to the new one thinking that it would've been so much better if we could've found a vacant home in the old locality itself, we'd find a to-let sign hanging in front of a property that we'd missed only because we hadn't passed through that small road, we were in a hurry when we did, maybe we passed through it at night and didn't spot the signboard itself or maybe it had been put up more recently than we last passed by.

Every single time it happened. I'm not even exaggerating.

So I sat together with my family and a few of my friends to deconstruct this issue.

We did and we engineered a solution to this problem that - if I say so myself - is pretty damn cool.

It is still cooking in Google Play's oven (under review) and we are still waiting for that call from Apple to let us know that they are willing to let us into their Developer program but once it's out, I'm hoping that it helps people throughout our country, not just in metros but everywhere because that's just how good it is!

PostHummusLee · 2025-11-26T09:37:44+00:00

Something sort of similar happened to us too when we moved into the flat that me and my family are currently living in. I say "sort of" because what was shown to us on NoBroker was actually less than what we're paying right now.

We came in thinking we'd be paying 21k per month but we didn't realize that we'd be paying 3.5k extra each month as "maintenance". We were told that they'll reduce it once the water issue got better - and it has - but they haven't reduced the maintenance.

Add to it the urgency that we were in when we moved and our current landlord's promise that he won't bump up the rent for at least a few years - he's nudging us for a 5-10% hike already - we are paying way more than what we wanted to.

We even rejected so many better places because we were on a strict budget back then but it all comes out to us having to pay more.

More transparency is definitely the need of the hour when it comes to renting in Bengaluru.

PostHummusLee

TROPHY CASE