Gone are those days when students of various institutions in Nigeria have to walk miles to get off campus accommodation, this is about to change as offkrent.com (‘off’ ‘k’ ‘rent’ dot com) created by a startup entrepreneur, Alao Tope, is changing and shaping the face of student accommodation. With operation in just University of ilorin campus as at November 2016, the founder said it has the vision to expand to other institutions in the coming year.
Who is Alao Tope?
Alao Tope is an entrepreneur that has always seek innovative means to solving problems. He is always persistent and optimistic for the future.
What problem is offkrent.com solving?
We created offkrent.com (‘off’ ‘k’ ‘rent’ dot com) to solve the problem student face when they are trying to get off campus accommodation, such as lack of ease of access to the accommodation of their choice, falling victim to fraud, Price inflation and extortion, and breach of agreement by some estate agents. By using our technology driven innovative means.
How do you make sure that students are not duped by fraudsters when they shop on your website?
We double check a lot and never take any deal on phone or social media, we make sure we establish personal relationship with all our estate agent clients. We know a lot about them, they are people of high integrity and they have proven this over the past one year and two months, so students are rest assured that they are safe on our website as we get to carry out rigorous quality control for hostels that are uploaded on our website.
How has the journey been so far?
In the past, we have depended on personal financing which has brought us so far for the past one year and two months now. To expand our reach to more campuses and to build our technology to help manage hostels, we will need some funding and this is why we have been contacting some investors to invest in our business as we believe this is a business with multimillion dollar return potential.


What is next for offkrent.com?
When we first started, we set out to help students get accommodation easily and also to help estate agents get more sales, but now, after a year, we have realized that both the student and the agent require more than these. Student need to trust their estate agent on payment, that if they pay, they will be able to get exactly what they are paying for. Estate agents also need a means for organizing and managing students data. This is why we are seeking to build our technology around this challenges. In the next 3 to 5 months we want to integrate our payment system and add more features to our website that will help both the agent and students do transactions easier. We intend to help agents get more value for their business and reduce their stress of having to take every student to their hostels, which is stressful. At offkrent, we believe that data is the future and we will be providing data that is enough for student to make tangible accommodation decisions. In the past we have used data such as Name of accommodation, location, price, available facilities and agents contact. But we hope to improve the amount of data available to students by including details such as distance to the nearest main road, more elaborate addressing system, rent terms count down e.t.c.

Nice initiative and great idea... you're really an entrepreneur because you're solving problem and also creating wealth. This is the kind of innovation that this nation need to balance or rise our dwindling economy to pinnacle. Motherland Nigeria and motherland africa is bless. Please kindly add me on whatapp with number 08032585914