Should we just dehumanise our homes already?
How at Nestaway we see ourselves as a “Bank of homes”
A home is an asset class like no other. It's personal, for it’s a place of intimate memories. It's unique, for its filled with the labour of love. It’s assurance, for times unknown. It's packed with care, built with love, ushered with irrational devotion dedicated only to the gods and very close loved ones. People spend years in debt and many more years stuck in traffic just to have their name on a concrete enclosed space, hours away from anything resembling a city. The relationship is so personal, our homes could almost be mistaken for a very close personal friend. Our homes are humanised, dare is say even deified.
But this love is the exact thing that breaks the home rental market. Instead of treating the home like any other asset and allowing for its free trade and rent, it's protected by rules by homeowners that protect how it should be used and how it shouldn’t. Take money, the most sought after asset in the world. No one cares if the money you carry today was in possession of a Non-Vegetation yesterday or a bachelor the day before. Money is devoid of any emotional hangovers, hence its success, as any staunch capitalist would say. But for the sake of building a robust rental market, is it time we made this asset, the home, as placid and money?
No. Its too sacred a place for market economics to pillage on. The instinct to own one’s own space is derived from a very deep-seated emotional need for physical and physiological safety. Its lure is of evolutionary origin. And for the majority of the market is subject to this emotional connect, It's too expensive a market behaviour to change with just capital. The home rental market seeks an enlightened version of market economics, in which the deeper emotional connect of the asset needs to be respected and even exploited. Like traditional banks leveraged the liquidity of money and created a market for lending and borrowing capital, the home market needs a bank of homes.
We at NestAway see ourselves as just that, a bank of homes. While a traditional bank deals with money, a perfectly liquid asset, our bank of home deals with an asset that is personalised and needs to be cared and matched with great precision. In our experience, it’s not easy but required. Our asset is not as liquid as we would like it to be. We deal with a very personalised asset. So our bank has to deal with the entire rainbow of Indian heterogeneity of tastes, regional nuances, cultural preferences, religious leanings and at times just plain racism linked to its assets. It’s a bank that needs to figure a precise way to lend assets, a fresh way to assess credit and a sophisticated manner of asset-liability management. So we are building the bank, brick by brick, with really smart folks. Folks who have themselves found it very hard to find rental homes. Folks of very high integrity and intent who found the market treated them like crooks when they were trying to find a home for themselves. Folks who have found it extremely painful when their rented homes were vandalised by malice intent. It's just their sheer ingenuity and persistence at solving the problem that will get us there.
