RealStay India: a PG and co-living platform
A rental platform matching tenants with verified paying-guest and co-living accommodation. We handled design, the web platform and the Android app, with preference matching, safety tooling, owner dashboards and subscription tiers.
The brief
Finding a paying-guest room in an Indian city is a low-trust process: listings are stale, brokers take a cut, and safety information is usually absent. RealStay India set out to fix the trust problem rather than just aggregate listings.
What we built
Search and discovery
Filterable listings across a wide set of cities, searchable by budget, location and preferences.
Preference matching
A short guided quiz produces compatibility scoring against available listings, so a tenant gets a shortlist rather than an undifferentiated results page.
Safety tooling
The platform carries an emergency SOS control, a helpline route, owner background checks and women-only reviews. These are product features, not marketing copy, and they had to be reachable in a moment of stress — which shaped where they sit in the interface.
Two-sided accounts
Separate portals for tenants and property owners. Owners get inquiry management and analytics; tenants get saved searches and direct contact with owners, including WhatsApp integration, on a zero-brokerage model.
Subscription tiers
Tiered monthly plans for owners listing properties, with the billing and entitlement logic behind them.
Android app
An Android application on Google Play, sharing the web platform's backend so listings, enquiries and owner responses stay in step across both.
Design, web and app in one scope
We handled the whole thing: the interface design, the web platform and the Android app. For a product whose core promise is trust, that mattered — verification badges, safety controls and review signals had to read identically on a phone and in a browser, because a tenant checking a listing on the move and an owner replying at a desk are looking at the same claim.
Designing and building both surfaces ourselves meant one design system and one backend, rather than an app trying to catch up with a website that had already shipped.
The hard part
Two-sided marketplaces fail when one side is underserved. Owners needed listing and inquiry management fast enough to be worth doing weekly; tenants needed enough verification signal to trust a listing they had not yet visited. Most of the design effort went into that balance.
