MilikiRumah bets on rent-to-own housing with $50M fund and a vision for financial inclusion

In an interview with AsiaTechDaily, cofounder and finance director Xin Yuan explains how the proptech startup is using data, partnerships and alternative financing models to unlock homeownership access across Southeast Asia.

MilikiRumah, an Indonesian property technology startup focused on expanding access to homeownership, has launched a $50 million private equity vehicle — the MilikiRumah Indonesia Rent-to-Own Offtake Fund 1 to scale its rent-to-own housing model across the country. The four-year closed-end fund targets a 20% internal rate of return (IRR) and will initially focus on Greater Jakarta, including Bogor, Tangerang, Bekasi and Depok.

The fund is a major milestone for the young company, owing to its transition from early-stage startup to a platform seeking to play a larger role in Indonesia’s housing finance ecosystem. The initiative is designed to finance residential developments and enable homeownership for consumers who are typically excluded from traditional mortgage systems.

Indonesia faces a major housing affordability challenge. While the country has a decent housing supply and large developer land banks, access to financing remains a major barrier for many households. Millions of Indonesians — particularly those working in the informal economy or gig sector — struggle to qualify for bank mortgages due to irregular income streams or a lack of conventional credit history.

MilikiRumah aims to address this gap by positioning itself as an infrastructure platform connecting property developers, financial institutions and homebuyers. Through its rent-to-own (RTO) model and data-driven underwriting approach, the company seeks to help underbanked consumers gradually build financial eligibility for traditional mortgage financing.

In an interview with AsiaTechDaily, Xin Yuan discussed the structural challenges in Indonesia’s housing finance system, misconceptions about informal income earners and how the company is attempting to balance investor returns with financial inclusion.

Your background spans finance, capital markets, and entrepreneurship. What problem did you see in Indonesia’s housing and credit systems that convinced you MilikiRumah needed to exist?

Homeownership is still low in Indonesia (around 50% in Jakarta) and there is a 15 million housing backlog. This backlog is not caused by supply as developers have huge amounts of land bank and ready stock units available. This backlog is caused by the access to financing for consumers to purchase. 

Access to housing finance is low as there exists many inefficiencies in the current operating systems in the housing finance ecosystem, hence MilikiRumah exists to become the infrastructure platform that bridges these inefficiencies for stakeholders to enable more homeownership and financial inclusion.

With the launch of the $50 million MilikiRumah Indonesia Rent-to-Own Offtake Fund 1, what are you hoping to achieve and what role do you see investors playing in the company’s mission?

We have proven that our technology model is successful in enabling the real estate and financial ecosystem for more homeownership access, we are now inviting more investors and partners to join us in our mission to empower more homeownership opportunities and financial inclusion in Southeast Asia – and empower your capital with real social impact

Indonesia’s underbanked population is economically active but largely excluded from formal credit. Why has the traditional financial system failed them for so long?

The current operating systems of financial institutions are almost exclusive to the working population that are permanent employees with fixed income. 

60% of Indonesia’s working population are non-fixed income, for example, solopreneurs, freelancers, people who have their own food stalls, people who have their own e-commerce online shop etc.

Data transparency is still low as financial institutions do not have the expertise and infrastructure sophisticated enough to collect, process, and analyze data to derive insights from the informal working sector. Hence the financial institutions do not have enough reliable data points to confidently underwrite financing for them.

What is the biggest misconception investors or policymakers have about informal income earners?

The biggest and most common misconception is that informal income earners make little and are less affluent than formal income earners. In fact, what we found from our experience is that the informal income earners are earning more than formal income earners, if not at least within the same range.

For example, in one of our project visits and consumer study, we interviewed consumers who work in factories with fixed income and consumers who work as freelance social media streamers with non-fixed income. The consumers who work in factories have a monthly income range around IDR 5-10 million while the consumers who work as freelance streamers have a monthly income range around the same range with some earning as high as IDR 100 million per month.

MilikiRumah operates across real estate development, fintech, and asset management. Where do you see the highest execution risk today?

In my view, what is most challenging is shaping consumer behaviour and awareness. While there is a natural primary-driven demand for home and shelter, the process of becoming eligible for it requires good habits and discipline. Yet the other side of consumer nature is consumerism which tempts consumers into short term gratification which could delay their eligibility for bigger purchases such as housing.

How do you communicate risk to limited partners when your end consumers are traditionally viewed as “high risk” by banks?

These consumers are viewed as “high risk” by banks as the current operating systems of banks do not have the means to derive data points on this profile of consumers to have reliable underwriting. Therefore our tech systems and models are built to collect, process and analyze data to come up with reliable profiling of these consumers. We are able to see the repayment capacity of each consumer in much more detail.

Secondly, we have constant active monitoring of each consumer payment behaviour and milestones throughout the Rent-to-Own (RTO) program and this will update the repayment capacity of each consumer and flag out any probability of defaults early for us to take preventive measures.

Furthermore, the way we structure the business model is meant to be free of consumer default risks. We are holding full ownership of freehold real estate assets and we have established processes for events of consumer defaults for us to replace with a new consumer to minimize lag in income from payments. These assets increase in value of 5-10% year-on-year historically, hence we do not lose asset value if the consumer defaults. 

Some critics argue rent-to-own models can trap consumers in long payment cycles. What safeguards do you have to ensure this doesn’t become financial limbo?

As it is our mission to empower homeownership and enable more underbanked consumers into the bankable consumers, our RTO model is engineered to graduate the consumers into regular bank mortgage within a fixed period of time.

Greater Jakarta is your initial focus. What specific market conditions make the region well-suited for MilikiRumah’s model, and how are you thinking about expansion beyond Indonesia in terms of cities or countries?

In the housing backlog, a large proportion of the demand from first-home buyers is in houses priced below IDR 1 billion, and these houses are concentrated in Greater Jakarta (Bekasi, Bogor, Tangerang etc.), typically nearby transport infrastructure and employment nodes.

As we speak to our partnering developers, there is a high mortgage rejection rate at their projects in Greater Jakarta of average 50-60%, where 1 in 2 consumers are rejected mortgage which is very high. 

We already plan to expand our infrastructure and solutions to neighbouring countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines where access to housing finance is also limited.

If MilikiRumah succeeds at scale, what do you hope changes most — not just in homeownership outcomes, but in how financial institutions think about risk, trust, and the underbanked?

MilikiRumah’s vision is to build and become the housing finance infrastructure platform for emerging markets where data transparency and analysis is not well established. We hope that we are able to use data to prove the ability and willingness of the deserving underbanked who were previously excluded because there has not been enough clarity and data on them.

As MilikiRumah moves forward with its fund strategy, the company is positioning itself at the intersection of property development, financial technology and institutional capital. By combining rent-to-own housing with data-driven underwriting and structured investment vehicles, the startup is attempting to address one of Indonesia’s most persistent structural challenges: the gap between housing supply and access to mortgage financing.

While Indonesia faces a housing backlog estimated in the millions, the issue is often less about the availability of homes and more about the financial infrastructure needed to connect buyers with lenders. A large share of the country’s workforce operates outside the traditional salaried employment system, leaving many consumers without the documentation or credit history required by banks. MilikiRumah’s model seeks to bridge that gap by generating new forms of credit data and gradually transitioning consumers into bankable mortgage borrowers.

The company’s strategy also reflects a broader shift underway across emerging markets, where fintech and proptech platforms are increasingly attempting to build alternative credit infrastructure for underserved populations. If MilikiRumah can successfully demonstrate that informal income earners can be reliably profiled and financed at scale, it could reshape how lenders and investors evaluate risk in housing finance — not only in Indonesia but across Southeast Asia.

For investors, the challenge will be balancing the promise of financial inclusion with the realities of housing development and consumer credit risk. For policymakers and financial institutions, the emergence of models like MilikiRumah’s raises a larger question: whether technology and alternative data can help integrate millions of underbanked households into the formal financial system.

If the company succeeds, the implications could extend well beyond individual housing projects. MilikiRumah’s longer-term ambition — to build a housing finance infrastructure platform for emerging markets — suggests a future in which access to homeownership is determined less by formal employment status and more by a broader, data-driven understanding of creditworthiness.

Quick Takeaways

• MilikiRumah launches $50M fund: The Indonesian proptech startup has unveiled the MilikiRumah Indonesia Rent-to-Own Offtake Fund 1, a four-year private equity vehicle targeting a 20% IRR to scale its rent-to-own housing model.
• Addressing a major housing finance gap: Indonesia faces a housing backlog of around 15 million homes, largely driven by limited access to financing rather than supply shortages.
• Targeting the underbanked workforce: MilikiRumah focuses on informal and non-fixed income earners—including freelancers, small business owners and gig workers—who often struggle to qualify for traditional bank mortgages.
• Data-driven credit profiling: The company uses technology and data analysis to better assess repayment capacity among consumers who lack conventional credit histories.
• Partnership-driven model: MilikiRumah works with property developers and banks to help consumers transition from rent-to-own arrangements into traditional mortgage financing.
• Greater Jakarta as the initial market: The company is initially targeting Bogor, Bekasi, Tangerang and Depok, where demand for affordable homes and mortgage rejection rates are particularly high.
• Long-term regional ambition: Beyond Indonesia, MilikiRumah plans to expand its housing finance infrastructure platform to other Southeast Asian markets such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.