Leading Nigerian property portal Nigeria Property Centre, which features in our revised infographic of the Top Property Portals of Africa, has recently launched portals in Kenya and Ghana and has plans for more. The company, which unlike some of its rivals in the African property portal scene is bootstrapped rather than heavily investor-backed, launched its Ghanaian portal in June and its Kenyan portal in July.
Nigeria Property Centre’s Founder and CEO Nnamdi Chineme told us that the company has plans to expand into yet more African markets, namely Uganda and Ethiopia, but that he would not be taking anything for granted:
“We by no means imagine that becoming a big player in the new markets will be a walk in the park. There are strong players in markets we have launched in, however, our experience in running the biggest property portal in Nigeria puts us in a great position.”
Chineme believes that the experience his company has gleaned from building Nigeria Property Centre into a leading force in a developing market such as Nigeria will stand it in good stead to do so in other markets with similar profiles.
“We spent the last 9 years building and testing a property portal for emerging markets which are fairly unstructured in nature. We now have a service that our users love and a business model that is sustainable in difficult markets like Nigeria. We believe we can add a lot of value in other emerging markets and this is why we have started launching in other African countries.”
Currently, many African markets are dominated by generalist classifieds sites which do not specialise in property. It will be fascinating to see whether the addition of the Property Centre brand of portals can overcome the hegemony of these generalists and have the same effect in other countries as it did in Nigeria.