A One-Click Destination

The Economic Survey 2016-17 highlighted that migration had doubled from 5.5 to 6 million a year during the 2001-11 period to almost 9 million a year in the 2011-16 period.* Since, migration mostly happens from small towns to cities, there has been a sharp rise in property prices in big cities. In such a scenario, rental housing is a promising option for potential buyers. Anshul Gupta, co-founder, FastFox.com, in an exclusive interview to Indian Management, talks about how they are democratising the rental housing space and providing end-to-end solutions.

- Ashutosh Gotad

What led you to venture into the rental residence solutions market?

A typical home-seeker spends approximately twelve days seeing around fourteen properties, spending time with five to six brokers, to find a house he or she may like. This experience is completely offline and fragmented. In today’s day and age, everything you do begins with researching online, where we spend the most part of our time. So the journey would first start with research and then culminate in a transaction. This transaction may not happen online, but the research does, in most cases. However, in the case of looking for a house on rent, this is not true. People scout for properties by directly contacting different brokers, making the experience mostly an offline one; something they would have done in the 1980s and ‘90s too. The only difference is that you would have walked into the broker ’s office then, as compared to now when you find them in classifieds. FastFox sees this as a big challenge in the rental housing, or for that matter, in the real estate sector as a whole, and we intend to solve that.

The rental residences market is still an agent-driven one, and references play an important role. How have you overcome this challenge?

I agree with your point; we actually work with agents on the inventory side. They do a great job of discovering property. They have their own network, they figure out where properties are, and we work with them to uncover those. We do make use of technology to uncover these properties at city-level and present them to the end-user.