Hello folks, welcome to CCB. In today’s post I’ll be sharing my experience with a house rental service provider.

The rental service provider we struck a deal with was NestAway. Initially we were given a soft copy of all the terms and conditions regarding the deal. At first sight we were a little hesitant to strike a deal since most of the terms favoured towards NestAway. But later on we signed the deal though we were a bit uncomfy.

Basically we owned a propety consisting of 26 single bedroom homes. The fees that NestAway charged us for getting the tenants to occupy the homes was 7.5 % of the rent of the house. 7.5 % initially felt colossal but had we not struck a deal then the chance would have been that we’d lose a lot of time to get the homes filled by putting up a To-Let board. So getting 92.5 % of the rent was better than losing 100 % or lower. I was the one who would make the spreadsheet at the beginning of every month and 7.5 % rent of 26 homes was greater than my salary at my day job. So I spent a lot of time pondering if I could get the house filled my myself rather than getting helped by a house rental service provider. But there were some cons with me trying to get the job done. And one such thing was the legal aspects involved in the business. One example of it is, getting the tenant verified by the cops. There are many occasions where the owners get grilled and some examples of it are, a tenant living with expired visa, criminal incidents / mal practices occurred in the building etc. Being an introvert I definitely couldn’t manage such situations. Therefore going with NestAway made sense. Let’s move on to the other aspects of the service. One good thing about the couple of months we stayed with this service was that the rent was delivered to the bank account on first of every month. That was cool because usually owners receive the rent on or before tenth of every month, especially in India.

Well the aforementioned were the pros. Let’s get to the cons of the service. The service which was supposed to maintain the building didn’t pay the entire salary of the security gaurd. The salary of the watchman was shared by the owner and the tenant on a 50-50 basis i.e. we paid 50 % of the security’s salary and the company paid the remaining. But that cannot be termed as a total con and the reason was we could appoint the security of our choice. The pro of the aforementioned was that we could call the watchman of the building and get notified about the happenings of the building. We resided at a place that was a bit far from the building and when we wanted to know about the happenings of the society we contacted the security guard. For someone staying away from the property, appointing a trustworthy watchman would come in handy. The next con with the service was regarding the cleaning of the property. The cleaning of the property wasn’t happening at regular intervals and when it happened we would get an email of the aforementioned with photos that had timestamps. Another con of the service was when we decided to terminate the deal, ( we wanted to sell the property and the buyer didn’t want the service provider). When we terminated the deal, the company asked the tenants to vacate and go to a different property. That sounded really dumb because in the spat between the owner and the service provider the tenants were the losers. Instead of asking the tenants to vacate, the company could have charged the owner a termination fee.

Well that was the story, we are on our way of developing another property and the building is to be completed by March 2021. And for getting the tenants to occupy this brand new property we are definitely not signing a deal with NestAway. NestAway’s got new competitors and we are on the process of signing the deal with the newbies. To know how those competitors are better or worse than NestAway, subscribe to my blog. See you next time with a different post. Byeeee 🙂