If you own a flat in Mumbai or Pune and live abroad, you have probably already hit the wall: every article says a Leave & License agreement must be registered, and registration in Maharashtra captures the biometric of both the licensor and the licensee. You are 4,000 km away. So how does anyone do this without flying back?
Yes — four different ways. The biometric requirement is real, but the biometric does not have to happen in India, and it does not have to be yours if you appoint someone. You can (1) grant a Power of Attorney to someone in Mumbai or Pune, (2) have a partner visit you at home where we have one in your city, (3) visit a partner’s premises if there are any near you, or (4) use the device relay, where a device already in your country reaches you from another customer. Routes 2–4 depend on where you live, so we check availability for your city before you pay anything.
Why Maharashtra Is the Hard One
This is worth understanding, because it explains every complication that follows — and it is the reason an NRI with a Bangalore property has a much easier time.
🏠 What your state actually demands
Under Section 55 of the Maharashtra Rent Control Act 1999, every Leave & License agreement must be registered regardless of duration — an unregistered one cannot be used as primary evidence in court. Registration goes through the Maharashtra IGR eRegistration system, which authenticates each party biometrically. That single requirement is what an NRI has to solve. Everything below is a different way of solving it.
The 4 Routes — Which One Is Yours?
All four produce the same thing: a properly registered Leave & License agreement for your Mumbai or Pune property. They differ in what they ask of you, and in where you have to be.
If you have someone you trust in Mumbai or Pune
You appoint a trusted person in India — a family member, a friend — to sign and give their biometric on your behalf. You never touch the registration yourself. This is the oldest and most universally accepted route, and it works from anywhere in the world. The trade-off is time: the POA has to be executed where you live, attested by the Indian Embassy or Consulate (or apostilled), couriered to India as a physical document, and then adjudicated locally before it can be used.
If we have a partner in the city you live in
Instead of you travelling, someone comes to you. We work with independent partners in a number of countries — the UAE and Canada among them — who travel to a customer’s home or office and complete the eKYC there. No Power of Attorney, no embassy queue, nothing waiting in the post. This is the smoothest route when it is available, and availability is purely a question of whether we have a partner near you, which is why we check before you commit to anything.
If a partner has premises within reach of you
The reverse of route 2: rather than someone coming to you, you go to them. Some of our partners — in the United States, for instance — work out of their own premises, so you visit and give the eKYC there. It is usually cheaper than a home visit for exactly the reason you would expect: nobody has to travel to you. If a partner near you has premises, this is often the quickest of all the routes, because nothing has to move — not a person, not a device, not a document.
If no partner covers you, but a device is already in your country
This one is unusual, so read it properly before you choose it. Where we have no partner near you, the device reaches you from another customer — someone in your country who recently finished their own eKYC and couriers their device on to you. We coordinate the handover and walk you through the capture over a call. When you are done, the device does not come back to us: you courier it on to the next customer, and we tell you who and where. It is the only route with real reach into countries where we have nobody, and the trade is that you are taking on a small obligation to a stranger — and depending on one having kept theirs to you.
Which routes are open to you depends on where you live — and we will not know until you tell us. Our partner network is small and uneven: strong in some countries, absent in others. Route 4 depends on another customer near you happening to have a device. None of that is something we can promise from a web page, and we would rather say so than take your money and work it out afterwards. Send us the city and country you are in and we will tell you which of the four actually applies to you — before anything is paid.
How to Tell Which Route Applies to You
🧮 Work down this list — the first one that matches is usually your answer
The Power of Attorney Route in Detail
If you land on route 1, this is the sequence. It is the step most NRIs underestimate, so start it before anything else — the agreement itself takes days, the POA can take weeks.
Execute the POA in your country of residence → get it attested by the Indian Embassy or Consulate (or apostilled, if your country is party to the Hague Convention) → courier the physical document to India → your POA holder gets it adjudicated / registered locally → the POA holder can then sign and complete the biometric registration on your behalf.
A general POA is not always necessary — a special POA limited to executing and registering the rent agreement for one specific property is narrower, and many NRIs prefer it precisely because it cannot be used for anything else. We can draft it to that scope.
TDS on Rent Paid to an NRI Landlord
This is the rule most NRI landlords miss, and it has nothing to do with registration — it bites afterwards, every month.
TDS on rent paid to an NRI is generally 31.2% (30% + 4% cess) — not the 2%–10% that applies when the landlord is a resident. The tenant is legally required to deduct it under Section 195, must hold a TAN, deposits it against your PAN and files Form 27Q. You reclaim it when you file your India return, and you can apply for a lower-deduction certificate to bring the rate down.
Say so explicitly in the agreement — that the owner is an NRI and that the tenant will deduct TDS under Section 195. Tenants routinely do not know this obligation exists, and the liability for getting it wrong sits with them, which makes it their problem and your dispute. Putting it in writing at the start prevents both. For your own rate, confirm with a chartered accountant.
Frequently Asked Questions
Tell Us Where You Are — We’ll Tell You Which Route Works
Send us the city you live in and where the property is. We will confirm which of the four routes is available to you, and what it needs, before you pay anything.