Moving out of your home, finding a suitable place to rent, and fully settling down in the new house, is a process that consumes at least 40 whole days and 1.5 litres of petrol each day; besides causing carbon emissions of 139.86 kg in its course: recorded a study - ‘Make my move' - conducted by an online rental agency in the city.
Facilities
From looking for a suitable house in the right location, to ensuring essential facilities such as schools, hospitals, water, power supply, telephone, cable and internet connections, the procedure is undeniably an arduous one.
And this has, today, been made several steps easier by the burgeoning online rental agencies.
Avoidable process
“Almost 80 per cent of the work involved in renting a house can be avoided in the online process, if the contacted agency is reliable. But, lack of awareness – both among home owners and seekers – is limiting the scope of the otherwise enormous online renting market,” said Naveen Kumar, managing director of Easy To Let, a city-based exclusive renting portal.
Middlemen
While over 10,000 individuals every month seek to shift their home, he informed that only about 30 per cent of them seek houses online.
Even as online agencies charge only owners on occupation of a home, most opt for brokers to whom they pay a month's rent or more as commission.
Registered agencies
While agencies informed over 30,000 residential spaces are available for rent in the city at any given point, merely 10 per cent of them are registered online.
Yet, both tenants and house owners who have benefitted from online registry are a significant number. Several agencies, most of who function as classified, list out houses available for rent, their location, area, and number of bedrooms, among others.
30 photographs
“While many websites have brokers who list out houses in their area; every house listed on our site is visited by us personally. We provide 30 photographs of every house listed so that what the tenant sees is what he gets. We also make all the essential facilities available,” said Mr. Naveen.
Even as it is most difficult for bachelors to find accommodation, a maximum number of those seeking homes for rent – over 30,000 of them – are bachelors.
Several online agencies also enlist specific shared accommodations for them.
From trying to help a tenant in new surroundings feel comfortable by providing information about plumbers, electricians, newspaper agents and the like, besides keeping the owner informed about the tenant details by way of ‘tenant screening', most agencies act as platforms for interaction of tenants, house owners and real estate agents.
