When he moved abroad, buying a flat in India felt like keeping one foot at home — proof he hadn’t really left, and a hedge for an eventual return. A decade on, it sits mostly empty. A cousin holds the keys. The rent, when it comes, is modest and irregular; the maintenance, the property tax and the occasional repair are not. He has thought about selling, but the paperwork from abroad, the capital-gains rules and the question of getting the money out have always seemed too daunting to begin. So it stays — an asset on paper, a low-grade worry in practice.

This is the NRI’s most common holding and least examined one. A distant property is easy to buy and surprisingly hard to own well.

An empty flat across an ocean is not a passive asset. It is a job you didn’t know you’d taken — illiquid, hard to manage, and harder to exit.

Why the flat quietly underperforms

From thousands of miles away, the things that make property work are the hardest to do: finding good tenants, chasing rent, maintaining the place, keeping the documents clean. Returns are often thinner than they look once vacancy, upkeep and currency are counted, and a large share of your net worth sits frozen in a single, indivisible asset in one city. Worst of all, when you finally want out, selling as a non-resident — with its TDS, capital-gains and repatriation rules — feels so complex that many simply never start.

Give it a purpose, or let it go

The first step is honest: ask what this property is actually for. If it is a genuine future home, keep it — but own it properly, with a real tenancy, a trusted manager and papers in order. If it is really an underused investment, accept that and plan a clean exit: understand the capital-gains and TDS position, the repatriation route through your NRO account and the limits that apply, and time the sale rather than dread it. Freeing that capital and diversifying it can quietly do more for you than the flat ever did.

Owning a piece of home is a fine instinct. Just don’t let sentiment harden into a stranded asset you neither use nor profit from. Either give the flat a real job, or give yourself permission to set it down. In two decades, the NRIs who felt lightest were the ones who held what truly served them and released what merely sat there.