How our rent data works.

Sources

What counts as a rent report

The map carries three kinds of pins. A “what I pay” pin is a first-hand claim: this is the rent I actually pay, for this home, right now. A seeker pin says “I'm looking around here, and my budget is X”. A next-home pin says “a place opened up near here, asking around X”.

Only “what I pay” pins enter our rent aggregates — medians, ranges, heat overlays. Seeker budgets and asking prices are marketplace signals, not rents, so they are excluded from every rent statistic we publish. Rent reports are anonymous by default; a signed-in member can choose to attribute their pin, but never has to.

At launch, the map is also seeded with public data — first-hand reports carried over from predecessor rent-map projects, asking prices from public listings, and published market research where first-hand reports don't exist yet. Seeded figures follow the same rules (report counts shown, rolling 180-day window), and every new first-hand pin takes priority as the real map grows.

Statistics

How medians are calculated

For each locality, we compute percentile statistics directly in the database over the rent reports in that area: the 25th percentile, the median (the middle value — half of renters pay below it, half above), and the 75th percentile. Together they describe the typical band, not just a single point.

Locality stats use a trailing 180-day window, so a figure always reflects the last six months of reports rather than stale history. Statistics are recomputed as new pins arrive and cached briefly (a few minutes) to keep the map fast under load.

We show the median rather than the average because a handful of outlier rents — a typo, a luxury penthouse, a landlord's wish — can drag an average far from what anyone actually pays. The median shrugs those off. Wherever a figure is shown, the number of reports behind it is shown beside it, so you can judge how firm it is.

Trust

How outliers and bad data are handled

Statistical checks. Every new rent report is scored against recent reports in the same city (and the same configuration, when given). A rent that lands more than three standard deviations from the peer mean is flagged as an outlier. We never flag on thin evidence — with fewer than five peer reports to compare against, no rent is called an outlier.

Flagged reports are excluded from the public map and from aggregates by default, and queued for staff review — they are not deleted. Staff can suppress (hide) or restore any pin, and every moderation action is recorded in an audit log.

Community reports. Every pin has a Report button. A pin is auto-hidden from the public map only after it accumulates five distinct reports — and reports never influence outlier scoring, so a small group can't weaponize either mechanism against a pin they dislike. Suppressed pins stay reviewable by staff and can be restored.

Buildings

How buildings are grouped

Rent reports can name a society or building. Before grouping reports by building, we normalize those names: case and punctuation are ignored, suffix words such as Apartments, Society, or Towers are dropped, and the wings, towers, and blocks of one society are merged into a single building. “Prestige Towers Wing B” and “prestige tower, blk-b” are the same building.

A building gets its own median only when enough reports name it — otherwise no building figure is shown at all, rather than a guess built on one or two pins. And as everywhere else, the report count is displayed next to every building figure.

Freshness

Freshness labels

Every figure carries a freshness label based on when its underlying reports were submitted:

• Fresh — includes reports from the last 180 days.
• Recent — the newest reports are within 18 months.
• Older — the newest reports are more than 18 months old.

We label rather than hide older data: a three-year-old rent is still a useful anchor, as long as you can see that it is three years old. Locality medians on city pages always use the 180-day window; older reports mainly matter where a locality is thin, and the label tells you so.

Deposits

Deposits

The deposit is an optional field on a rent report — not everyone knows or wants to share it. We show deposit figures (typically as months of rent) only where enough reports in an area actually include one; below that, we show nothing rather than extrapolate. Deposit amounts are stored in paise, exactly like rents, so no rounding ever creeps into the math.

Privacy

Privacy and safety

Pin coordinates are rounded to three decimal places — roughly 110 metres — before they are stored. That is precise enough to say “this part of Indiranagar”, and never precise enough to point at someone's window. Pins are anonymous by default: no name, no account, no phone number required to drop one.

Browsing rents needs no login at all. When a member opts into direct contact, their details are stripped from every public map payload — contact happens only through our connect flow, never by exposing personal information on the map.

Corrections

Spot a wrong figure?

Use the Report button on the pin itself and tell us what looks wrong. Distinct reports stack up — five is enough to auto-hide a pin pending review, and staff can suppress or restore any pin at any time. If you dropped the pin yourself, you can edit your own report directly (a corrected rent is re-scored against outliers automatically).

For anything else — a figure that looks systematically off, or a moderation decision you disagree with — reach us through Help & FAQ or the grievance officer.

Coverage

Reference rents, and small-sample honesty

Where pin coverage is still thin, we seed reference rents from published market research so renters get an indicative map on day one. Reference rents are real-data-priority: wherever genuine pins exist for a locality, references are skipped, and references never overwrite real pins. Reference-backed figures are visually distinguished on the map and never presented as transaction evidence in our articles.

We do not compute medians for groups below our confidence floor, and figures from small samples are labelled as early signals with their counts printed inline — our Gurgaon and Powai pieces currently print every pin rather than invent statistics from a handful of observations. Monthly medians that shift because of sample mix are disclosed as mix effects, never sold as price movement.

Editorial

Articles, authorship and independence

Data journalism and city reports are prepared by the MyBharat Research Desk and built on the anonymous contributions of India's renters — every article states its pin counts and window in its methodology section. Legal explainers are reviewed against the cited statutes' text (with the Act and section named); where a practising professional's review exists for a piece, the reviewed-by line appears on it. Rates that change — stamp duty, TDS thresholds — are dated in-line and linked to the issuing authority's own page. Our guides are information, not legal, tax or investment advice.

Nothing on this platform is pay-for-placement: no broker, builder, operator or co-living company pays to appear in any article, table or example. Coverage of any building is driven by where renters actually pin. Live map pages update automatically as pins land and are the source of truth; articles are the narrative around a dated snapshot.