Find a PG in Bangalore online, before you move

The hard part of moving to Bangalore for a job is not finding a room. There are thousands of rooms. The hard part is that you have to commit to one before you know anything useful about the city — which road floods, which junction adds fifty minutes, which “10 minutes from the tech park” means ten minutes at 6am and nothing like it at 9.

This is the sequence that works, written for someone who is not in the city yet.

Start from the office, not from the area name

Almost everyone starts by asking which neighbourhood is good. That is the wrong first question, because Bangalore is not organised around neighbourhoods — it is organised around a handful of office corridors, and the entire quality of your life here is decided by which side of one you sleep on.

Get your office address before you get anything else. Not “Bangalore office” — the actual building. Then look at what is within a few kilometres of it on the same side of the main road. Crossing the Outer Ring Road at the wrong point, or going through Silk Board junction twice a day, can cost you an hour each way for a distance that looks trivial on a map.

Some rough anchors, because they come up constantly:

• North corridor — Manyata Tech Park and Karle. People live in Thanisandra, Nagawara, Hennur, HBR Layout and Rachenahalli.
• ORR south-east — Ecospace, Embassy Tech Village, RMZ Ecoworld. That means Bellandur, HSR Layout, Kaikondrahalli, Panathur and Ambalipura.
• East — ITPL and Whitefield, served by Marathahalli, Brookefield, Kundalahalli and Munnekollal.
• South — Electronic City, where people mostly live in Electronic City itself, or in Kudlu Gate, Begur and Hongasandra to save money.

If you are still deciding between offers, decide the commute before the salary difference. Two hours a day is five hundred hours a year.

What you can settle from another city — and what you cannot

You can settle, over WhatsApp and a phone call, all of this: rent, deposit, notice period, whether electricity is metered or included, whether food is provided and what kind, how many people share the room, whether there is a curfew, and whether the room is actually free on the date you need it. All of that is words, and words travel.

You cannot settle any of this remotely: how the bathroom smells, whether the “attached” bathroom is a partition in a corner, how much noise comes off the main road at 11pm, whether the stairs are safe, whether the building is finished, whether the photographs are of the room you are being offered or of the best room in the building. Those are the things that make people move out in month two, and they are precisely the things a listing photo is designed not to tell you.

So the goal is not to find a way to trust the photos. It is to get someone to look at the room on your behalf.

The order that actually works

1. Fix the office address and your joining date. Everything downstream depends on these two facts.
2. Pick two or three areas, not one. Nothing kills a search faster than deciding you will live in one specific locality. Pick a first choice and an honest second.
3. Set a budget with the deposit in it. The rent is not the number that hurts. See our guide on deposits, advances and documents.
4. Shortlist four to six places, not twenty. Twenty is not diligence, it is paralysis, and half of them will be gone.
5. Have someone see them. In person if you have a friend or colleague in the city. Otherwise ask us — we go and video-call you from inside.
6. Block one place for your first two to four weeks only. Short, deliberately. You are buying yourself the right to choose properly.
7. Choose your real place in your second or third week, after you have done the commute at 9am on a Tuesday and again at 7pm.

The step people skip is the sixth one. They try to solve the whole housing problem before they board the flight, sign for eleven months, and spend the year regretting it. A short first booking costs a little more per night and saves far more than it costs.

Why the photographs are the problem

Independent PGs — the ones where the rent is reasonable — are usually run by a family with a building, not by a company with a marketing team. The photos are three years old, taken on a phone, of whichever room was empty that day. Nobody is lying. They just have no reason to reshoot.

The managed hostel chains solve this with virtual tours, but only of their own buildings, and their rooms cost considerably more. For the independent place two lanes from your office, nobody has ever offered to go and look at it for you. That gap is the reason this site exists.

How to run a video walkthrough so it is actually worth something

If someone is going to walk the property on a live call for you, do not spend it on the room. Spend it on everything around the room.

• Ask them to stand at the gate and turn a full circle, so you see the street.
• Ask for the bathroom with the tap running, and the geyser switched on.
• Ask for the kitchen, and to look inside the fridge and at the drinking water.
• Ask what is directly above, below and next door — a generator, a workshop, a wedding hall.
• Ask them to walk from the room to the main road, at normal speed, without stopping. That is your real commute distance.
• Ask about mobile signal inside the room. You will be taking work calls from it.

Also ask for a photograph of that day, with the date, rather than the listing photos. A property that will not give you one today is telling you something.

Before you send anyone money

The rule is simple and it does not have exceptions: nobody gets a deposit before a human being you can identify has stood inside the room. Not a token, not a blocking amount, not “just to hold it”. We cover the ways this goes wrong, and what a safe sequence looks like, in is it safe to book a PG in advance.

Two smaller things worth knowing. First, ask when the room was last actually confirmed as free, and by whom — a listing that is three months old is not a listing, it is an advertisement for a room somebody else is already living in. Second, get the rent, the deposit and the notice period written down in a message, from the person who owns the building. A number said on a call has a way of changing on the day you arrive.

Two weeks before you fly

Confirm the room again. Not because anyone is dishonest, but because independent PGs fill on a first-come basis and nobody will call you to say so. Ask for a message confirming your name, your move-in date and the rent, and ask what time of day you can arrive — a lot of places have nobody with a key after 9pm.

Then pack for the first week only. Whatever you leave behind can be couriered once you know where you actually live.