The Broken Home Finance Journey in India
Property buyers in India navigate an opaque system of lender policies, RERA compliance, and eligibility criteria. ColdStart Labs explored this space and found that the problem isn't information scarcity — it's information fragmentation.
Buying a home in India involves navigating at least three disconnected systems: property registration (RERA), lender eligibility (banks and NBFCs), and personal finance (income documentation, CIBIL scores). Each system has its own rules, and none of them talk to each other.
The Taksh Fin experiment started with a specific observation: homebuyers spend weeks visiting bank branches to understand whether they qualify for a loan on a specific property. Each bank has different policies for property age, construction status, builder reputation, and location risk. This information exists but is scattered across relationship managers, brochures, and internal policy documents.
The research led to a rule engine that encodes real lender policies — not generic eligibility calculators, but the actual decision criteria used by loan officers. Combined with RERA property data, this creates a "financability" score that tells buyers whether a specific property is likely to get funded, and by which lenders.
Key finding: users care less about comparing interest rates (which vary by 0.1-0.3% across major lenders) and more about binary eligibility — "Will this property actually get approved?" The product hypothesis shifted from comparison shopping to pass/fail checks, which proved to be the right framing.
Related experiments
Home finance platform built to simplify the property-to-loan journey. Includes a Property Financability Checker and a RERA/lender policy rule engine.
Related journal entries