I recently went house-hunting in Lagos. Thinking it would be easier than outsourcing the task to an estate agent, I checked a real estate website to find a house. After finding an apartment within my budget, I called the agent who’d posted the house online. He informed me that the house was available and asked for a N3,000 “registration fee” for a meetup.

Straightforward, right? Little did I know what awaited me.

“This is not the house you posted online,” I told the agent after he took me to an old bungalow in a location different from what he posted online.

“Ah, that house is no longer available,” he said. “I also have ‘three ‘clean ones’ that are still on ground.”

Frustrated, I left without seeing anything close to what was posted online.

Then I realised: finding a house in Lagos is no easy business.

Before the digital era, finding a house required a lot of work and walk. You had to go around town checking every “to-let” sign you could find and pray not to fall into the hands of fraudsters. Or you would just outsource the whole operation to a real estate agent who would handle all of that for you at a steep price. These factors made it difficult for people to find their dream house in Lagos.

However, with the growth of the internet in Nigeria, services like Jiji, OLX (which was later acquired by Jiji), PropertyPro and other platforms emerged. These are free platforms that allow people to post classifieds, including real estate, online. PropertyPro promised a “stressless approach to getting your dream home.”

My experience on these platforms was far from this promise.

Finding a house in Lagos remains as gruelling as ever and digital platforms aren’t doing enough to help. Lax on control measures, it is too easy for agents to force people back to the offline reality of house hunting.

Found a house online? Is it really available?

One way agents misuse online platforms is fake listings.

On platforms like PropertyPro and Jiji, one typically finds duplicate posts for the same house, sometimes from the same user. In real life, agents often take multiple clients to the same house and favouring the first to pay.

However, the difference between this offline reality and what you would find in the digital world is that most times such duplicate adverts are fake. The advertised property, many times, was never on the market or would have been rented many months before the advert was created.

“[The] first agent I got off a platform didn’t confirm if the house was still available,” said Ada, who used an online platform to search for a house.

“I got to the address with the agent and we were told that all apartments had been taken.”

“I paid for [both our] transport fares to and from the address, and I didn’t get to see the apartment,” she told me.

This is a situation that many house hunters encounter often.

But why do agents do it?

Typically, agents use the picture of good looking houses to attract prospective tenants to their listings. But in reality, many of these agents want to find tenants for houses that are either located in “unsavoury” places or are in pretty bad shape.

Others want to find clients for houses that are really just uncompleted buildings; they want clients to pay so the houses can be completed. They can’t draw clients in if they post the actual pictures of the property.

However, there is another reason why agents post fake adverts.

Source: https://techcabal.com/2019/11/14/the-unfulfilled-promise-of-digital-real-estate-services-in-lagos/