Digitising our agreements improved turn around time by 7x!
Engineers for India
Problem
Nestaway is a managed home rental platform. One of the biggest challenges we face is to get agreements signed by the owners. The market mostly runs on physical signatures where the agreement is printed, stamped and signed by owner. This process is typically offline and takes about a week after a lot of coordination efforts between our field teams and the owner. This leads to loss of rent for the owner, loss of business for us and potentially loss of a good house for a potential tenant. To fasten the process of getting agreements signed, we introduced digital agreements and we are the first Indian company to enable this in the home rental market.
Solution
Here is a video on how we created digital agreements for our users:
Impact
Average time to get an owner agreement signed reduced from 7 days to a day, thus saving 1/4th of the month’s rent (which is a pretty big amount in a lot of cases)
Making agreements digital also helped us reach out to owners not in town, for example, NRI owners.
Engineers for India
It’s said that you need a “large problem” and a “scalable solution” to build a successful venture. A random survey between your friends and family would reveal, that finding and living in a rental home in India could possibly be one of the largest such problems in India, maybe next only to traffic and water. According to the Indian Economic survey, our annual migration rate is about 10 million people every year, which directly flows into the rental market. Then why is that even after it being such a big apparent problem, no one has hit upon a “scalable solution”?
It’s because its a “hard problem”. There is hardly a business template in the world that can be applied, even in small parts, to the unorganized, Non-standardized and often unscrupulous world of the Indian rental market. Any first level solutions dig out more problems and angles that need to be thought through. No amount of capital can solve for ground-level issues of stereotyping and discrimination. As the rental home is a product that almost every Indian consumes, the heterogeneous nature of Indian consumer interest creeps into the nature of demand and supply. Weak dispute resolution mechanisms ensure that a large part of the available inventory remains locked up while large sections of the population lives in sub-standard housing.
At NestAway, we have stayed with this “hard problem”. In our journey starting from 2015, we have been solving the problem that most of us can relate to. Our engineering teams have never had to deal with the problem of context, unlike engineers working for problems disconnected from their world. Our problems are apparent, the solutions are not. We need you to help us.
Based on the data of millions of transactions executed by us; these are complex problems and would test you out both from the perspective of your approach to problem-solving & how to use technology to solve for India. For this, calling Engineers/Designers/Product Managers for India. If you think it’s you, check out our open positions.
