By Sarika Shetty, CEO & Co-founder, RentenPe
In the fast-changing urban landscape of India, finding a rental apartment can prove to be quite difficult, and is often accompanied by skepticism and intricate documentation. Landlords aiming to assess the reliability and financial stability of potential tenants tend to undergo a lengthy procedure that demands comprehensive background investigations and police verification – a chore that numerous landlords deem excessive and impractical. Tenants often struggle to maneuver through this convoluted system, where their personal information is dispersed across multiple platforms – and without any acknowledgment of their prior rental history.
However, it seems that this outdated system is all set to experience significant changes, thanks to the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology, leading to a smart new era.
Artificial Intelligence Can Automate the Verification Process
Artificial Intelligence has surfaced as a formidable resource to tackle the shortcomings of the existing system. Platforms powered by AI have significantly sped up the tenant screening procedure by automating a large part of it. This allows individuals to effectively bypass the tedious task of document reviews at every step of the screening process. These technologies employ advanced machine learning algorithms to evaluate various data points related to tenants, such as their financial history, job background, and social media presence. AI can swiftly confirm an applicant’s identity and financial stability by cross-referencing this information with official databases like Aadhaar or PAN, reducing verification time from weeks to just minutes while introducing objectivity that reduces human bias in the selection process.
AI enhances tenant verification by automating background checks, detecting fraud, extracting document data, and scoring tenants on risk––often deploying NLP, image analysis, predictive analytics, and forensic checks.
Blockchain for Trust and Security
While artificial intelligence provides both intelligence and speed, Blockchain technology provides the essential foundation of trust and security. Blockchain functions as a permanent digital record – meaning that once information is set, it can’t be changed or deleted by third parties. This feature is particularly groundbreaking for ensuring a safe and clear rental history. Picture this: the rental payments and lease contracts of your tenants could all be documented as ‘smart contracts’ using Blockchain technology. It also ensures a permanent record of their actions as tenants. With their consent, landlords can quickly gain access to this verifiable record, giving them confidence that their tenants can be relied upon without depending on subjective references or paper trails that could easily be falsified.
Blockchain offers a secure, transparent foundation for digitizing rental records, automating lease terms, and giving tenants control over their identity information—though adoption in India’s tenant verification remains nascent.
AI and Blockchain
The combination of AI and Blockchain signifies a groundbreaking transformation, enabling tenants to create ‘self-sovereign identities’ on the Blockchain — digital wallets that hold their verified credentials, which they fully control. When searching for rental properties, tenants can conveniently provide prospective landlords with access to certain details about themselves, such as their history of timely payments and police records. AI leverages secure and authentic Blockchain data to produce an immediate risk score for landlords to assess, ensuring a quick and reliable evaluation. This cohesive approach guarantees that AI outcomes are both rapid and trustworthy, while the decentralized nature of Blockchain safeguards tenant privacy by removing the necessity for central databases that may become susceptible over time.
As India’s rental market expands, a new technological framework is emerging that is designed to professionalize it all and protect landlords’ assets and income more securely than before. For tenants, this means more reliable rental units at better rates of return – providing greater returns overall and providing landlords with greater peace of mind for protecting assets and income streams. Tenants have the potential to reap the benefits of establishing a mobile digital identity due to the fact that it enables them to search for various housing possibilities across the nation while simultaneously building trust and justice between landlords and tenants. The possibility of establishing a rental environment that is intelligent, secure, and transparent pushes both government organisations and proptech businesses to accelerate this change. This is despite the fact that there are constraints such as regulatory frameworks and the requirement for widespread acceptability. In the context of the real estate business in India, artificial intelligence and Blockchain are not only emerging technologies; rather, they are now essential components in the process of establishing trust.
(Sarika Shetty is the CEO and co-founder of RentenPe, a tech-enabled market disruptor app which is building India’s first Rent Credit Score (R Score) and Residence Card (R Card), aimed at formalizing the residential rental market and promoting financial inclusion through rental data.)