Buying property in Kolkata means dealing with three separate people who don't talk to each other. A broker finds the flat. A bank agent handles the loan. A lawyer does the paperwork. Each one blames the other when something slips, and the buyer — usually a family making the largest purchase of their life — carries all the stress of coordinating them.

The listing portals don't help much either. They're built for volume, not for a buyer in Behala who wants to know whether the title on a specific plot is clean.

There was a second problem, less visible from outside. Kolkata's brokers work in isolation. One broker has a buyer looking for a 3 BHK in Lake Town. Another broker, two neighbourhoods away, is holding exactly that flat. Neither knows the other exists. Deals that should close in a week die because supply and demand never meet.

The workaround the trade invented is WhatsApp — dozens of category groups for warehouses, floors, land, residential, with hundreds of unindexed messages a day. Nothing is searchable, nothing is recorded, and the moment you post a requirement you've exposed your client to every other broker in the group.

We built MyThikana as two connected products: a public property portal for buyers, and a private co-broking network for the trade.

One roof for property, loans and legal. Buyers search verified listings by locality, property type and budget, then get the loan and the paperwork handled by the same team. Loan comparison covers SBI, HDFC, ICICI, Bank of Baroda and a dozen more lenders, with an EMI calculator and eligibility checker built in. Legal services — sale deeds, rent agreements, title checks, mutation, registration — sit alongside, not somewhere else.

A custom CMS with AI-assisted listing entry. Adding a property used to mean typing out a title, a description, amenities and specifications for every unit. The admin panel now uses AI to draft listing copy and structure the details from basic inputs, so a broker uploading eight photos and a few facts gets a complete, well-written listing instead of a half-filled form. Property pages, projects, localities and enquiries are all managed from one dashboard.

Side by Side — an AI-matched broker network. This is the part that doesn't exist anywhere else in Kolkata. Brokers post what their client wants; the system matches those requirements against posted stock using defined rules and AI-assisted matching, and surfaces the broker who's holding it. Commission splits 50/50, negotiated between the two brokers. MyThikana takes no cut.

Three design decisions make it work where WhatsApp groups don't. Nothing is exposed — building name, address and owner contact stay masked until both sides accept the connection. Every introduction is logged — who connected, when, on which property, at what split, permanently on record, so nobody can dispute a claim later. And MyThikana stays out of it — the platform never works a network post, and its own listings are excluded from the pool. Without that last rule no broker would ever post; they'd assume the host was harvesting their leads.

Built to be found. Locality landing pages sit at readable addresses like /property-in-salt-lake-kolkata, so someone searching for property in a specific neighbourhood lands on a page built for that neighbourhood. WhatsApp is the primary contact channel throughout, because that's how property enquiries actually happen here — not through a contact form that gets answered in three days.

Free to join, no subscription, no cut of anyone's brokerage. The network is being built first; monetisation comes after the record exists.