For millions of Indians, buying property has long been a gamble — tangled records, unclear ownership, and the constant fear of legal disputes. Landeed, a Hyderabad-based proptech startup, is changing that narrative. With over one million users, it has built India’s fastest and most trusted property title search engine, turning a traditionally opaque process into a seamless, transparent experience. In a conversation with CE, founder Sanjay Mandava shares how Landeed is combining hyper-local insights, AI-driven efficiency, and first-principles thinking to not just simplify property verification, but to redefine how India thinks about land ownership.
Excerpts
Landeed has built India’s fastest property title search engine with over a million users. What gives your approach a unique edge in India’s proptech space?
When we started Landeed, there wasn’t really a ‘title search market’ in India. Property data was fragmented, unreliable, and ignored by technology companies. By building India’s fastest and most trusted title search engine, we didn’t just enter a market, we created it and brought national attention to it. Importantly, our system is designed from real-world experience. What separates us is the discipline to stay focused on our core solution and design from first principles — speed, trust, and intelligence at scale. Landeed isn’t just a search tool; it’s the operating system of property ownership in India. We approached this problem from a first-principles mindset and really unpacked it. One of our biggest advantages is that our team members come from various industries beyond real estate. That allows us to ask the kind of basic questions a normal person would ask and that’s how we build. We go deep into customer understanding and ground realities. We have a rule — unless we can solve a problem offline, on the field, we don’t list it on the app. Everything starts from the customer upward. On the talent side, we focus on engineering and mindset.
Property verification in India is complex. What made you realise technology could solve it?
I experienced land encroachment on one of my own properties. When I started digging deeper, I realised how opaque and complex the system was. If you come from the Western world, this problem seems unique to India. People often say India’s property systems aren’t developed because we’re not a developed country. But that’s not true. You actually need to develop your property records in order to become a developed country, not the other way around. It’s a prerequisite for India’s development that we clean up our titles. When you buy a property, you also buy insurance against the title. If a dispute ever arises in the future, the insurer provides you financial assistance or allows you to go to court to fight for ownership. India has neither. We have something called a presumptive ownership model, which means that if I sell a property to you, the government says, “I have nothing to do with this. It’s up to the buyer to verify if the seller is the actual owner.” A sale deed is only a record of two parties engaging in a transaction. It’s not a title deed that gives you legal ownership. So, the buyer has to do the due diligence — checking across multiple government departments to confirm whether the seller truly owns the property. Since the government isn’t verifying ownership, there’s no single title document that gives you complete ownership over a property. What we’ve done at Landeed is to bring all these different departments and their records into a single interface within each state, allowing users to access all relevant documents almost instantly.
With Landeed Labs integrating AI and ML, how will it transform property dealings in India?
When we work with AI, we’re not using it for predictive insights in the typical sense — not to generate market reports or act as a research arm for developers. Instead, we use AI to make the customer experience easier and more intuitive. For example, many people don’t understand documentation language. If I asked you, “What document do you need to know who the present owner of a property is?”, most people would be confused. In our app, we have a voice AI that tells you exactly which document you need, reducing friction for users. Another example: whenever you’re buying a property or applying for a home loan, you need a title search report or legal opinion. Since we’re the fastest at procuring these documents, our ingestion engine uses AI to generate a legal opinion in less than 10 minutes. We’re the first in India to do this, and the best at it, thanks to the amount of data our models have been trained on. We’re not using AI to make investment decisions. We use it purely to improve user experience, not to give investment advice.
