When Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath revealed he prefers renting over buying a house

Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath said that he prefers renting a home over purchasing it as he thinks that real estate at existing valuations were “ridiculous and retarded”.

“I could not get myself to buy real estate at today’s valuations because personally, I think they are ridiculous and retarded with interest rates where they are, for prices of homes and offices to go up does not make sense,” Nikhil Kamath said in a podcast in October.

He revealed that he continues to to stay in a house that was not owned by him. In the future as well, he plans to live the same way, he said, explaining, “Yeah, I don’t foresee that changing. The only one home that I have is where my parents live and that is more for emotional reasons, but the way I look at it is if I am able to earn 10 per cent, 12 per cent on money deployed and I am able to rent homes in India at 3 per cent and if my budget for a home was let’s say ₹10 and I can earn ₹12 on that, if I can rent three or four apartments in that ₹12, it will never make sense for me to buy a home because the rental yield I am dishing out is significantly lower than the capital deployed, the returns they give me.”