How we keep the data honest

Every number on this site comes from anonymous strangers. That only works if the pipeline between "someone typed a rent" and "a median on a page" is defensible. This is that pipeline, in full.

What a pin is

A rent pin is a location + what the renter actually pays + the flat's basics. No name, no phone, no email, no account. We can't identify who pinned — by design, there is nothing to leak or sell.

Privacy protections on the data itself

• Location fuzzing: displayed pin positions are deterministically offset by ~40–120 m, so a rent can never be traced to a specific flat or tower. Exact coordinates never leave the server (they're used only to compute the locality label and matching distances).
• Hashed IPs: abuse-prevention systems (rate limits, report caps) store irreversible hashes, never addresses.

Quality controls on the way in

• Sanity bounds: rents outside ₹2,000–₹5,00,000/month are rejected.
• Geofencing: pins in parks, lakes, forests or outside the Noida/GN/GN West boundary are rejected — nobody lives in the Yamuna.
• Bot traps: hidden-field and timing checks catch automated submissions.
• Burst detection: suspicious patterns (many pins from one network, clusters of near-identical rents appearing within minutes) are quietly held for human review before they can touch any statistic.
• Rate limits: per-network submission caps, enforced in the database.

Quality controls once it's live

• Community reports: any pin or listing reported by 3 different people disappears from the map pending review. A single network can contribute at most 2 of those reports, so one WhatsApp group can't vote an inconvenient rent off the map.
• Outlier warnings: a rent more than 3× (or under ⅓ of) its area median carries a visible caution label.
• Duplicate weighting: the same flat pinned twice (a renewal, two flatmates) is counted once in every statistic.

How we present numbers

• Medians, not averages, as the headline figure — one luxury penthouse can't drag a locality.
• Sample sizes everywhere: every median shows how many pins it rests on, labeled low / medium / high confidence. We'd rather look thin than pretend.
• No scraped data: nothing on this site is lifted from listing portals — their numbers are broker asking prices, which is exactly what this map exists to correct. During the bootstrap phase some pins are clearly-labelled seeded estimates — see the next section.

Seeded estimates — the bootstrap phase, in the open

A crowdsourced map has a cold-start problem: nobody pins on an empty map. Our answer is seeding — done transparently or not at all:

• Some pins are seeded market estimates: calibrated from locality-level market knowledge, jittered around area centroids. Not scraped listings, and never presented as a real person's rent.
• Every seeded pin says so on the pin itself — open one and the "seeded estimate" note sits beside its date.
• The homepage counter says "rents mapped" and counts everything on the map, seeds included — it deliberately does not claim they are all real submissions. Seeds are excluded from the Pin & Win draw and every leaderboard.
• Locality medians may blend seeded estimates with real pins while samples are thin — the sample-size label on every median tells you how much data sits underneath.
• As real pins arrive, seeds are retired. The goal is a map with zero of them.

What we don't do

• No broker listings, no paid placement in data, no advertising deals that touch the numbers.
• No selling of data. Contact details (for listings/seekers only) are shared exclusively inside a private match, and nowhere else, ever.

Found something that looks wrong? Use the flag on the pin itself — or check the FAQ for how hiding works. The map is only as honest as the people on it, and the people on it have been remarkably honest so far.