From a Pune Brokerage Struggle to Rentfly: The Founder’s Journey

The Founder & Owner

Rentfly was founded by Dipak Bade, who continues to lead the company as its Founder and Owner. What began as one person’s frustrating house-hunt in Pune has grown into a platform built on a simple belief: renting a home should be direct, honest and effortless.

The Real Story: Arriving in Pune

Dipak Bade came to Pune the way thousands of young Indians do every year — with a bag, a laptop and a long list of dreams. The city promised opportunity. The first requirement was simple enough: a place to stay.

It turned out to be anything but simple. Listings that looked perfect online did not exist. Numbers rang out. Visits were scheduled and cancelled. Every path back to a real house seemed to run through a broker.

And then came the moment he still remembers clearly. After days of running around, he finally found a modest rented space — and before the keys were handed over, he was asked for a heavy brokerage fee. A full month’s rent, paid on top of the deposit and the advance, for a phone call and a door being opened. Standing there, counting out money he had saved for the actual beginning of his life in Pune, the frustration turned into a question.

Why should people struggle and pay high brokerage when renting can be made direct, transparent and digital?

That question did not go away. It followed him through the next months, through conversations with flatmates, students and working professionals who had all paid the same invisible tax on moving to a new city. Rentfly was born out of that shared frustration.

Reinventing Rentals

Rentfly’s vision is deliberately narrow and deliberately stubborn: remove the middleman from the rental journey. Owners list directly. Tenants discover directly. Both sides talk to each other, see the same information, and agree on the same terms — with zero brokerage in between.

For a newcomer landing in Pune, that changes everything. Instead of a week of chasing agents across Baner, Hinjewadi, Wakad, Kharadi, Kothrud and Viman Nagar, they can compare verified flats, rooms, PGs and flatmate options in one place, with real photographs and real rents. The agreement itself moves online too — a digital rent agreement that can be created, signed and stored without a single trip to an office.

• Zero brokerage, always — owners and tenants connect directly.
• Verified listings so that what is shown is what exists.
• Digital, legally sound rent agreements delivered in days, not weeks.
• Support built for students, bachelors, families and businesses alike.

The larger ambition is to make Rentfly a name people trust the way they trust a good friend’s recommendation — starting in Pune, and then in every city where someone arrives with a bag, a laptop and a list of dreams. Dipak Bade’s measure of success is not the number of listings on the platform, but the number of people who never had to pay brokerage again.

“I could not get that month’s rent back,” he says about that first brokerage bill. “But I can make sure the next person keeps theirs.”