Mumbai to Get an Apartment Rating Tool Shortly

Bangalore: Hunting apartments for rent, is one of the most time consuming and tedious process one has to go through. But, to simplify this process a free online rating tool is being developed, which Mumbai city will be receiving shortly. With this online rating tool, rental apartment seekers can review a particular apartment online and decide whether that apartment is the right option for them or not based on the rating, reports Pragati Verma, MagicBricks Bureau.

Mumbai is likely to receive the online rating service through Rentenna, which provides interactive apartment building scoring engine to New York City (NYC) tenants. The company is planning to extend its services in Mumbai as well and is currently in a discussion with Common Floor, a company that provides data about Mumbai apartments through private community portals for residential societies in India. Sandeep Kella, co-founder, Rentenna cited that “We are planning to apply the NYC model to Mumbai. Both the markets are similar in terms of competitiveness and scale of buildings. But it’s tougher to get enough verified data for each building in India,” repots MagicBricks.

The search engine provides data related to rental, like details of landlord, the review of a particular building from existing tenants as well as former tenants, perceived value and facilities offered, considering all these a rating is done on a 100-point scale. On this note, Kella stated that “We founded Rentenna after seeing recommendation engines for just about every product category like restaurants, travel, music, household products but nothing to help people make the most important and most expensive decision,” reports MagicBricks.

Rentenna currently has a growing database which includes 15,000 NYC buildings info, the company plans to build a strong database by hitting target of 1 million buildings by the end of 2012. They are also planning to introduce this service to other cities like Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, and also planning to expand its services across entire U.S in 6 to 9 months. According to Kella, India is likely to be the first market outside U.S where Rentenna is looking forward to get accustomed with the services which would meet Indian needs. According to MagicBricks report, Kella further explains that “In India, we will look into the possibility of building a community around the building including the doorman, driver and household help.”

The apartment scoring system will be customized so that individuals can avail this service as per their choice. Moreover, Rentenna is looking forward to introduce this application for mobile and tablets as well. The company is also using social networking sites as a platform to make the app user-friendly. “As we understand user preferences, we will provide a high-level data summary to advertisers and allow them to create targeted ads where advertisers know what kind of building people are searching for,” explains Kella, reports MagicBricks.