Does Santa Claus watch when you pay rent on time?

If yes, what kind of diary does he use to distinguish good kids from delinquent ones? And what stockings can you hang to translate this good behaviour into rewards home loan discounts, prop-tech speed, landlord KYC or more?

- Pratima H

When a company claims to be the country’s first rent credit score repository, with the potential to transform the rental ecosystem, it raises many intriguing questions. Is there a white picket fence around this venture, and how has technology taken centre stage on the porch, rather than being relegated to the backyard? We turn to Sarika Shetty, Co-Founder and CEO of RentenPe to help clear up some of these uncertainties.

What spurred this idea?

I was living on rent for quite a few years and I suddenly realized that I’m paying rent but it’s not getting recorded anywhere and I had to change a residence every 11 months or 24 months. I had to constantly prove myself to the new landlord and no records were being maintained. Or there was no repository which I could just hand over to the new landlord and show him my creditworthiness or my credibility or where I hailed from. Or provide my entire data of where I lived in the past five years, or how well my behaviour had been or the health of my rental payment hygiene etc. I felt that there was a need to establish kind of a record which could give more credibility to tenants even while they migrate from one city to the other because, in today’s generation, we see that millennials generally have graduated from B-Schools and various other institutions, then they migrate for work from smaller tier 2/3 cities. When I went for a home loan, many questions arose despite my rental discipline. They were abiding by the RBI rules and according to the rules they never considered rent as one of the financial parameters.

Now, that is exactly the point where it triggered that probably this was a kind of a problem statement that I wanted to address and then I spoke to EY and I gave this entire business idea of mine to them to ratify.

How did it translate into a venture?