"Finding a good house to rent is so tough," said the new tenant who has recently moved into our neighbourhood.
"No, finding good tenants is even tougher," my mother mumbled to me.
I guess, both situations are hard.
But we all know that our smartphones are on a mission to make our lives easier by providing easy solutions to our every day problems. So, to help the landlords and the tenants, here comes the application from NoBroker, a path-breaking service initiated by IIT - IIM Ahmedabad graduates, Amit Kumar Agarwal & Akhil Gupta.
NoBroker is a unique service that connects the house owners directly with the prospective tenants and removes the need of brokers, thereby saving the broker commission money.
NoBroker has recently launched an Android App. However, before checking out the app, I checked out NoBroker website. And I was much impressed by the looks and user experience of the website and the services it offers.
The NoBroker website greets the visitor with a nice line drawing of a cityscape, with cute little cars and busses that actually move across the screen. At the website, one can easily list property or browse through the lists of properties available.
To search for a house available for rent, just select the city, the BHK criteria and search by adding a locality name in the search box. The page that loads up offers more criteria that you can set up to help in your search. These include setting up whether the home is needed for a bachelor or family, girl or boy, whether you need a two wheeler parking or four wheeler parking, what amenities you need near your home and of course, the rent range. The user can easily view relevant details of the houses mentioned in search result and shortlist them.
The house owners can list their property on the NoBroker website for free. All they need to do is create an account and add all the relevant details of the property.
NoBroker takes care of verifying the landowner and the tenant. Best of all, they also make it easy to create and register the Rental Agreement. The house owner or the tenant can easily create the agreement using the online tool of NoBroker. Then an appointment for registration can be scheduled. A Biometric Registration is carried out on the scheduled day and soon after the registered Rental Agreement is delivered to the concerned parties.
All this can be done from the NoBroker website. But in this world of smartphone, an app to rent houses is absolutely needed. And considering that, NoBroker has also recently launched an Android App. So let's check that out now.
The user interface of the Android app is as pleasing as the website. Of course, there's no animated cityscape here. The app is easy to use. Just setup your search parameters if you are looking for a property to rent. The search results will show you houses available matching your requirement. You can check out their relevant details, the amenities near them and even look them up on the attached Google map. You can shortlist the properties you like and even call the owners directly from the app.
Listing of property by homeowners is easy too. Just choose the option of Post Your Property and input all the details in the input fields . These would include the personal details, the locality details, the amenities available and the rent details.
In addition, NoBroker recently announced a scheme that can benefit even those who are neither house owners nor looking for home on rent. This scheme is designed to augment the crowd-sourcing of the owner listing on NoBroker, This is the Click to Earn feature introduced by NoBroker. It can be accessed from the menu of the app. It offers users the opportunity to earn just by uploading the photos and details of properties that are available for rent. That is, if you see a house being available for rent, just click its picture, upload it on NoBroker, add the owner details and earn rewards.
The app is easy and useful. But the thing that pleased me best about this app is the About Us information and the Contact details of NoBroker that can be accessed easily from the app's menu. The contact details include a number that can be used to send a WhatsApp message. This definitely feel reassuring to the user.
The NoBroker services is as yet available in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore in Chennai. However, they have extensive plans of expansion and will be soon available in other major cities, including Delhi.
To clarify matters a little, I put forward a few queries about this and got the following responses:
What's the forecast about the service being available in other places.Are there any plans for the service to spread to northern India, especially Delhi?We have very aggressive expansion plans. Delhi is an important market and we plan to begin operations there very soon. Not only Delhi, we will have operations in top 20 Indian cities by the end of December this year. We recently began operations in Pune and Chennai and the customer response has been outstanding. In barely a week after launch, we achieved such a customer pull that we were able to register 2500 properties each in these cities. We are getting an overwhelming customer response since this industry was waiting for C2C disruption and majority of the customers no longer want to deal with brokersIs the Click & Earn service also only available for people living in Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Chennai?Yes the 'Click & Earn service is available in all cities that we are operational in - namely - Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune & Chennai. Please note that these cities contribute to 43% of rented properties among the top 20 cities in the country. The key reason to go to these cities first is : High internet penetration, bad experience of customers with brokers , and high number of rental properties under circulation. Delhi is the only major market which is remaining for us. We should be there in next 2-3 months since there is a heavy demand of customersWhat's the earning potential of the Click & Earn program? A user can earn 100/- per verified listing with no upper limit on number of listings. So, theoretically, there is no limit as long as user provides us with genuine owner details. We are getting humongous response from our customers for this feature. Every day, we are getting 100 to 200 direct owner properties on our website due to this. With Crowdsourcing feature of ' Click & Earn', we have enabled everyone in the city to be a broker- buster.
Talking about the NoBroker app, Amit Agarwal, Co-founder & CEO commented, "The reason why this app launch is so game-changing is that this is the world's first and only rental P2P mobile app. With an ecosystem of 2 lakh registered genuine owners and tenants, we have done what nobody earlier believed can be done - removing brokers and disrupting this age old industry with technology. This is a major disruption in the entire real estate rental industry. It is attracting interest from across the world since it's a paradigm shift in the way transactions were happening."
As per Mr. Akhil Gupta, "We are the first one to crowdsource the owner listing in this rental category, through the feature 'Click n Earn' where anyone can click and upload picture of any TO-LET board with the genuine owner details and earn handsome rewards from our side. Now, everybody can be a Broker-Buster!."
Important links: NoBroker website NoBroker Android app on Google PlayFor more information, check out this video: