You live here. Your flat is there.
Renting out a property you are eight thousand miles from is not a smaller version of managing one down the road. It is a different problem, and almost nothing is built for it.
What actually goes wrong.
Not the things a brochure lists. The four that everyone who owns property in another country recognises immediately.
You find out last
The rent was late three weeks ago. You heard about it when you asked. There is no month-end anywhere, so nothing tells you — you have to remember to check, from eleven and a half time zones away.
Someone is doing you a favour
A cousin, a neighbour, a family friend collects the rent and calls the plumber. They are not paid for it, you cannot chase them, and the arrangement quietly costs you the relationship as much as the money.
There is no record
Rent arrives as a transfer with no reference. Repairs are cash. Two years on, nobody can reconstruct what was paid, what was spent, or what the tenant actually agreed to.
Nobody has read the agreement
The lease is a scan on somebody's phone. When the tenant leaves and the deposit is disputed, the document that settles it is a photograph of a photocopy.
Your rent never leaves India. Your bill never leaves here.
These are two separate things and we keep them separate on purpose. Rent follows the property. Billing follows you.
RentNLease sits beside this line — never on it.
Your tenant pays into your NRO account in India. We are not a step in that line, and there is no account of ours for the money to pass through on the way.
Your tenant pays in India, in rupees
into your NRO account, the way they already pay for everything else. Nothing about their side changes and nothing has to be explained to them.
We are never in the middle of it
we do not hold your rent, we do not route it, and there is no account of ours for it to sit in. We record that it happened.
You are billed here, in dollars
by the US company, on a US card, on US terms. Your subscription and your rent do not travel together — they never touch.
You see it from here
what is due, what arrived, what is late, what was spent and on what — in English, on your phone, at your breakfast, not theirs.
An Indian SIM is no longer the barrier it was.
This is the part most people have not caught up with, and it is what makes the whole arrangement workable from abroad — provided your bank participates.
- 1 The scheme allows a US mobile number — since the NPCI opened UPI to foreign numbers in January 2023, an Indian SIM is no longer required to operate it.
- 2 Linked to your NRO account, at a bank that offers it — not every Indian bank does, and an active, fully KYC-compliant account at a bank outside the scheme still will not work. Your bank can tell you in one call; we cannot.
- 3 The United States is supported — it is one of the twelve countries the scheme covers.
Our reading of the scheme's published coverage — not something we have tested on your behalf, and not advice about your account. Your bank is the authority on whether yours can do this.
We would rather say "not yet" than say a number.
When the landlord lives outside India, the amount a tenant is required to withhold from rent is not the same as when the landlord lives in India — and the obligation sits with the tenant. Get it wrong and it is your tenant who carries the consequence, which is a difficult thing to discover after the fact.
Plenty of software would simply print a percentage and move on. We are putting the treatment to Indian counsel first, including whether it is even appropriate for a platform to display a figure at all. Until that comes back, this page states the problem and nothing more.
We do not give tax advice, and nothing here is any. What we intend to do is make sure neither you nor your tenant meets this for the first time halfway through a tenancy.
Where this actually stands.
We publish this rather than let you discover it. RentNLease has no customers yet and no payment rail is live — not in India, not in the United States.
Properties, units, tenants, leases, rent cycles, payment records, receipts and maintenance requests all run today. What does not: live collection through UPI, automatic reminders reaching a tenant, and deposit settlement at move-out. Those are on the roadmap, graded from an audit of the codebase rather than from intent.
If you own property in India and live here, you are the first person we are building for. Early access means exactly that, including the rough edges.
The ones people actually ask.
Do you hold my rent at any point?
No. For property in India your tenant pays you directly and the money never enters an account of ours. That is not a policy we could quietly change — there is no mechanism for us to hold it. If you also own property in the United States, that arrangement is different and we describe it plainly on how it works.
Does my tenant have to change how they pay?
No. They pay the way they already pay — the same app, the same account. What changes is that the payment is matched to the right month and the right agreement, and a receipt exists afterwards.
What about tax? I have heard it is different for NRIs.
It is different, and it falls on your tenant rather than on you, which is what makes it awkward. We are taking the exact treatment through Indian counsel rather than repeating what the internet says. We will not show you or your tenant a number we cannot stand behind — see below.
Can I give my family member access without giving them everything?
That is the intention — a limited role for whoever handles things locally, so they can log a repair and confirm a payment without seeing your finances. The role model exists; this specific arrangement is still being built.
Can I use this if my property is in the United States instead?
Yes — that is the rest of this site. The product covers US property, and the money works differently there, which we set out on how it works.
Own a flat in India from a house in America?
Tell us where the property is and what is painful about it. We will tell you honestly whether we can help yet.