A Bengaluru couple has been forced to move out of their flat in Bellandur after their landlord decided to increase the rent by Rs 18,000. The family was given two options -- either pay up or leave -- and the family decided to shift to a smaller flat 3 km away.
Anwesa Chakraborty, 36, and her family had moved into the 3-BHK flat in Bellandur amid the lockdown in August 2020 when she was pregnant. The rent was Rs 25,000 and both the parties agreed to increase the rent by Rs 1,000 every year.
At the beginning of 2022, however, as the number of Covid cases in the country plummeted and companies began to ask their employees to return to work from the office, Chakraborty's landlord demanded the rent be hiked to Rs 35,000.
"This was after we renewed our agreement for the year and began to pay 5 percent extra rent at Rs 27,000," Chakraborty, who works with an audio OTT platform, told Moneycontrol. "He then said the rent of the area had increased and flats like the one we were living in were being rented out for Rs 45,000."
"We were asked to either pay more rent or leave," Chakraborty said. The mother of a toddler shared the flat with her husband, mother, and an ailing 75-year-old father-in-law.
As the family began to look for a house in the area, they came to know that their landlord had already found new tenants who had agreed to pay Rs 45,000 rent. "He had offered it on sharing basis, so he found replacements very quickly," Chakraborty said.
The family meanwhile shifted to a much smaller 2-BHK in nearby Carmelram, with a rent of Rs 18,000.
Moneycontrol reached out to Chakraborty's landlord, but he refused to comment.
The Chakraborty family is only one among the hundreds who have been facing the heat as residential real estate prices doubled in the city since last year.
“Rental market is too hot right now,” Prashant Thakur, head of research at property consultancy firm Anarock told Bloomberg. “Apartments had to be rented out at very low rates during Covid as many went back to their hometowns. Now that people are getting back to the office, landlords are making up for their losses with higher rents.”
Chakraborty, however, considers herself to be one of the lucky ones. "We ended up receiving 80 percent of our deposit money. Most of our friends in Bengaluru managed to get back only 20 percent whenever they moved houses. So that way, we've been lucky," she said.
Read more: No wild animals, only 'legal husbands': Bengaluru sees a spurt in bizarre rent agreements
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