Nigerian Real Estate Does Not Have a Technology Problem

Every few months somebody announces that Nigerian real estate is about to be disrupted by technology. An app, usually. Sometimes a platform. Occasionally something with blockchain attached to it.

And yet if you have been selling property here for any length of time, your week looks much the same as it did five years ago. You are still explaining to a buyer why the same flat is listed at three prices. Still trying to establish whether the person who sent you a listing actually has the mandate. Still answering “is this one real?” more often than you answer questions about the property itself.

So it is worth asking why all that technology has changed so little. Our view, and we would say this even if we sold nothing: the market has never had a technology problem. It has a record problem, and those are not the same thing at all.

What a Record Problem Looks Like From the Outside

Take the complaints people make about Nigerian property and lay them side by side.

The same property appears on several sites at different prices. Buyers cannot tell which agent genuinely holds the mandate. Listings turn out to be stale, or already let, or in a couple of unfortunate cases never existed. Two agents call the same buyer about the same flat and quote different figures. A property that has been on the market for eight months is presented as new.

These get discussed as separate problems, usually as separate failures of individual honesty. They are not. Every one of them is the same underlying absence showing up in a different place: there is no shared record of what is for sale, at what price, held by whom.

Once you see it that way, the pattern is hard to unsee. You cannot have duplicate listings if there is one record per property. You cannot have three prices if the price attaches to the record rather than to whoever is retelling it. You cannot wonder who holds the mandate if the mandate is part of what is recorded. That single change is the subject of its own piece, on why one listing per property fixes more than it looks like it should.

Why an App Was Never Going to Fix It

This is where most attempts have gone wrong, and it is an honest mistake rather than a foolish one.

If you believe the problem is that agents lack tools, you build an agent a tool. A nicer way to list. A better place to store contacts. An app to manage the portfolio. All genuinely useful, and we build some of those ourselves.

But a tool given to one agency improves that agency. It does nothing at all about a market where nobody can verify anybody. Give every agency in Lagos an excellent private database and you have a market with several hundred excellent private databases that still disagree with each other. The buyer’s experience is unchanged. She still sees four prices.

Records are different from tools in one specific way: they only work when they are shared. A private record is a filing cabinet. A shared record is infrastructure, which is what the MLS is for, and it is a different kind of thing from a CRM, which is a very good private filing cabinet and makes no claim to be more. Nobody has ever solved a trust problem by giving each party a better filing cabinet.

The Part That Falls on the Honest Agent

Something worth saying plainly, because it usually goes unsaid.

The cost of all this lands hardest on agents who are doing everything correctly.

Your listing is real. Your price is the honest one. You do hold the mandate. And you still spend the first twenty minutes of every conversation establishing facts that should be checkable in seconds, because your buyer has been burned before, or knows somebody who was, and has no way of telling you apart from the person who has not been straight with her.

That is a tax, and you did not earn it. Somebody else did, and you are paying it. A shared record does not just make life easier for buyers. It is the only thing that lets a good agent be visibly, checkably good, rather than simply insisting they are and hoping to be believed.

What Changes When the Record Exists

This is the part where the effect stops being about tidiness and starts being about money.

Your listing reaches further than your following. In a shared database, one listing can appear on every member site rather than only the one you own, which is the job the IDX plugin does on each of those sites. An agency with three mandates and two hundred Instagram followers has a genuinely different reach profile than it did the day before.

Advertising stops competing with itself. Several agents can end up running ads on the same property, bidding against one another, driving the cost of a click up for all of them and confusing the buyer who sees all three. One record with a clear origin makes that structurally difficult.

Duplicates collapse. One property, one entry. The buyer sees a market rather than the same flat five times, and the search results start meaning something.

Provenance is answerable. Who holds this mandate becomes a question with an answer rather than a matter of assertion, and it becomes checkable by somebody who has never met you.

What a record looks like when a property has one. The reference, the date it went on, the status and the title document all belong to the property rather than to whoever is retelling it.

And the whole thing speeds up. Most of the delay in a Nigerian property transaction is not paperwork. It is verification, repeated by every party, from scratch, every time. Take that out and deals close faster, which is worth more to an agent than any individual feature.

Being Honest About the Hard Part

None of this happens because one company builds something. That would be a convenient thing for us to claim and it would not be true.

A shared record only works if it is genuinely shared, which means agents have to put listings into it, keep them current, and take them down when they go. It is collective infrastructure, and collective infrastructure needs participation before it delivers a return. Early on it will always look like more effort than it is worth, because the network is small. That is not a flaw in the idea. It is what building any shared thing feels like at the start.

The way it becomes worth it is straightforward, if not easy. Every agent who lists properly makes the record slightly more complete, which makes it slightly more useful, which makes the next agent slightly more likely to join. That is the whole mechanism, and there is no clever shortcut around it.

So What Should You Actually Do

If you are an agent reading this and wondering what any of it means for your Tuesday, it is fairly simple.

List properly, in a place that can be checked. Keep your listings current, and take down what has gone. Be the agent whose mandate is answerable. Not for our sake, and not as a favour to the market, but because in a market this short of trust, being verifiably straight is the most valuable position available, and very few people are competing for it.

The technology part is the easy half, honestly. We can build a shared record and we have. Whether it becomes the thing Nigerian property runs on depends on how many agents decide it is worth being in.

If you want the longer version of how any of this reaches a buyer in the first place, how Nigerian agents actually get leads covers the channels. If you would rather ask a person, tell us what you are dealing with.

See how the shared record works