Not rent, but your identity could be the dealbreaker while house-hunting in India
By Naman Shah
“What is your full name?”, asked the houseowner when I enquired details of the property she had put out for rent. It is common to ask the last name for determining the caste or religion of a person. More so, in the house-renting process.
In search of a new place, I was checking the houses in my neighbourhood which advertised ‘TO LET’ banners on their doors. Many houses had additional text on their banners – ‘ONLY FOR FAMILY’. As a single man, I had less options.
This was four years ago, when I walked around the nearby blocks in search of a house. If I were to find a house today, what would the situation be? Let’s understand it by a map.
But are they really?
I classified the filters of marital status and food habits because they were specified on the housing website. In reality, there are other discriminatory filters, too. They become apparent only when one actually speaks to the houseowner.
I scraped the data of all the houses listed for renting in Noida's Sector-19. These listings were made on nobrokers.in. The whole process of scraping is explained in the Jupyter Notebook attached in the Github repository of this story.
The scraped listings were then classified based on their filters.
Anomaly: The listing page for Sector-19 had 27 houses available for rent on the day of scraping i.e. 26 July, 2025 (the webpage can also be found in the Github repository). However, upon putting the coordinates of those houses on geojson.io, it was found that four houses were located outside the periphery of Sector-19. So the final analysis was done on the 23 houses located in Sector-19.
This story was done as part of Lede 2025 Data Journalism Program of Columbia Journalism School.