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He had been renting happily in Bengaluru for six years.
No loans. No EMIs. No stress. Just a straightforward monthly rent and the freedom to move if he needed to.
Then the pressure started. Friends buying flats. Family asking when he was going to “settle down.” The constant background noise of the Indian middle class telling him that renting was wasting money.
He found a flat in East Bengaluru. ?1.2 crore. He almost signed.
Then he started looking more closely.
The builder was offering discounts. Not because prices were falling — but because the bookings that were supposedly full were not actually full. The “fully booked” claims did not match what he was seeing on the ground.
Then came the legal concerns. Documents that needed more scrutiny than he had time to give them.
He backed out.
The refund was its own nightmare. He had to follow up more than a hundred times before his booking amount came back. A hundred times. For money that was legally his.
He posted about it on r/indianrealestate under the title “Don’t let FOMO empty your wallet.” The post got hundreds of responses. People recognising the same pressure. The same fear of missing out. The same builder tactics.
One comment stood out. “Every time I delay buying a flat, I feel like I’ve delayed the stress of a ?1 crore loan.”
There is something honest in that.
The rent versus buy question in India is genuinely complicated. In Bengaluru’s tech corridors, 2BHK apartments average ?85 to ?120 lakh now. At current home loan rates of 8.5 to 9.5 percent, that EMI consumes nearly half of most professionals’ take-home pay.
Meanwhile, IT professionals in India change jobs every two to three years on average. Forty-five percent of them prefer renting precisely because of this. Locking yourself into a ?1 crore loan for a city you might leave in three years is a real risk that nobody talks about at family dinners.
The man who posted the Reddit thread is still renting. Still happy about it.
