For a country that books cabs in seconds and has groceries delivered in minutes, India’s rental market remains stuck in an older era and startups feel the heat. Earlier this year, Shreya Jaiswal, founder of Fawkes, experienced that gap firsthand during what she calls a “house-hunting maze” that no app seemed able to simplify.
A Digital Journey That Led Back to the Same Old System
Like most urban renters, Jaiswal began her search with a battery of popular platforms, Housing, 99acres, Magicbricks and Facebook groups such as Flat and Flatmates. She reached out to agents through friends, sifted through dozens of listings and kept her phone on standby for callbacks.
But the excitement
faded quickly. Nearly 90% of the listings on these apps, she found, were not posted by owners but by brokers masquerading as them. Each promising lead turned into a cycle of calls, missed follow-ups and, often, silence. Despite the glossy interfaces and advanced filters, the user experience felt surprisingly familiar and frustrating.
Why Landlords Still Trust Brokers, Not Apps
After days of chasing leads, Jaiswal realised the core obstacle wasn’t technology at all, it was trust. The Indian rental market is dominated by individual landlords, each with a single property they consider a significant financial and emotional asset. For many, uploading details online and dealing with unknown tenants feels unnerving.
Local brokers, however, offer familiarity and reassurance. They claim to “know good tenants,” handle keys, verify prospects and execute the offline legwork owners don’t want to deal with. The result is an ecosystem where:
- Brokers control most listed inventory
- Owners rarely participate directly on platforms
- Apps unintentionally rely on intermediaries to stay relevant
The technology exists, but the trust hasn’t shifted.
The Economics That Keep Startups Dependent on Middlemen
For years, proptech startups have tried to position themselves as broker-free discovery platforms. But as Jaiswal notes, removing the broker requires replacing him and that is where the economics break.
To operate without brokers, a platform must shoulder responsibilities that are currently shouldered manually:
- Taking photos and managing listings
- Handling tenant calls and screening
- Arranging site visits
- Verifying identities
- Coordinating move-in documentation
All of this is costly, especially at scale across cities and neighbourhoods. Brokers absorb these expenses today and earn only when they close a deal. Startups, in contrast, would need large on-ground operations and higher capital to provide an equivalent end-to-end service. Few have found a sustainable model to support that.
In effect, the very middlemen technology promised to eliminate have become essential to its functioning.
A Fragmented Market Too Complex for Simple Disruption
India’s rental market is unlike markets where full-stack players have succeeded globally. Here, most landlords are small, individual owners. They do not maintain multiple properties, do not optimise for digital conversions and often prefer personal intuition over data.
Apps can aggregate supply, but they cannot force landlords to behave like institutional partners. The market is too fragmented, hyper-local and relationship-driven for a lightweight digital marketplace to solve on its own.
The result is a unique stalemate: tenants search digitally, landlords operate manually, and brokers bridge the gap.
Where the Real Disruption Might Come From
Jaiswal believes the next breakthrough won’t be another listing portal, but a system that recreates the reliability of a broker with the transparency of technology.
Such a platform would need to offer:
- Verified profiles of both landlords and tenants
- Predictable processes across discovery, negotiation and move-in
- Mediation support throughout the rental cycle
- Guarantees that reduce perceived risk for both parties
In short, the disruptor would have to be full-stack, not just a discovery tool. It would need to manage the rental experience from start to finish, something no current app fully provides.
A Problem Still Waiting for a Bold Solution
For now, India’s rental market continues to run on the muscle memory of its brokers, a network built on trust, geography and personal rapport rather than algorithms. Technology has improved access but has not been able to remove the intermediary who holds the market together.
As Jaiswal’s experience shows, the gap between how Indians want to rent and how they actually rent remains wide. For entrepreneurs looking for India’s next big unsolved problem, this is a market waiting and struggling to be rebuilt.
Also Read: What Is the Difference Between a Startup and a Business?
