Storage spaces come to the rescue
Exuberant rents, salary deductions, job insecurity — times are tough! And to survive in such difficult circumstances, professionals are relocating their stuff to storage facilities, till they return from their home towns.
Social media timelines are filled with posts by young professionals offering to keep belongings of others at their rented space for 50% or a lesser amount. Anish Bakshi, who posted about one such storage facility on a Gurugram group on
Facebook, says, “The idea is to help people who’re being made to pay full rent, even though they are not living there. We are offering storage in the flats that I own.”
A 22-year-old marketing manager in Gurugram, Anamika Manhas, says, “I couldn’t move to the new house and there was a lot of family pressure to return to my home town, Jammu. I flew two days before lockdown. It’s been three months now. And all my stuff was at my previous place and my notice period was over, too. This service was helpful.”
For Varun Kataria, who owns flats and PGs in DelhiNCR, storage space has become a means to sustain him. He says, “We send a vendor to get their luggage picked up, and then confirm with the owner each item on the check list. After all this checking, we send a video for confirmation,” adding that people have reached out to him from cities including Mumbai.
Aditya Kaushal, a 32-yearold fraud investigator with an MNC, says that after his landlord refused to reduce the rent, “The only option left was to find a storage facility and store our stuff over there”.
Those who are renting out their place for storage are ensuring they share all crucial information in advance. Kovid Ummat, an advertising professional, is renting his two rooms as storage space. He says, “security is a concern, too”, but he “ensures that I and the other party share all details prior”.