No place for parents in ‘to-let’ market

Landlords in the Capital are willing to accept less rent but not aged parents and extended families of their tenants, reports Vivek Shukla.

Aged parents and relatives stay out. If property owners of the capital or NCR could have their way, this could soon become the norm for settling the rent amount with would-be tenants looking around for accommodation.

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Dr Devinder Gupta of 21 Century, a real-estate advisory firm, says this mentality has reached “epidemic proportions” in the capital. Landlords are even willing to accept less rent but not aged parents and extended families of their tenants. A man and his wife and two kids are of course welcome without “extra baggage”.

Ranjeet Khare, a television journalist who recently relocated from Nagpur, had to move in and out of rented houses because of the landlords’ bias against his parents.

Whenever he went house-hunting, he was quizzed by landlords regarding the size of his family, whether his parents would live with him and if his siblings would, off and on, stay with him.

“I put up with this for more than three years and then bought my own house in DLF. Many of my colleagues have faced the same problem and have not been able to let their parents live with them on a permanent basis,” says Khare.

Chairman of the Aditya Group, Uma Aggarwal, says due to this unfortunate trend a very large number of people purchase their own houses. “They feel it is better to have their own house rather than live with guilt,” says Aggarwal.

Sandeep Wahal, who has rented his Mayur Vihar house to a banker with wife and a kid, says that he sees to it that he rent out his flat to a small family because “the flat gets damaged if a large family moves in”.

Sumit Jha, another bank official, says he had to undergo the ordeal of not getting a rented house for more than three months, as he wanted to keep his parents with him.

“Chances of large families grabbing the house or creating trouble for their landlord is very high. This is what the landlords say,” adds Jha. “It's a lame argument. Tenants sign a rent agreement, don't they? It is a legal document.”

AK Nandy, who owns a flat in Dwarka, clearly doesn't think so. As a landlord he says he has a “right” to decide who he lets-out his house to.