“Invest in real estate; it always appreciates.” Those were the words Margaret* took home from a business conference she attended in Nigeria, where, according to her, a delicately dressed and eloquent real estate agent gave a keynote address on wealth management. “Crypto dips; stocks tank; uncertainties are everywhere, but real estate is as sure as sure gets,” the agent sermonised, before segueing into the land offers he had. The land prices would be 12X in four years, according to his experienced partners, and people like Margaret could make fortunes from the deal if they jumped in early. Margaret threw in 30 million naira—$75,000 at the then exchange rate—for two plots of land, but a hearty congratulations from the agent was all she ever got; she was never allocated land. Word eventually got out that the sale was illegal, and the real estate company vanished soon after. Avoiding such Margeret-esque realities is HouseAfrica’s mission for Africans.

“Trust is broken in our local real estate markets, and we want to fix that,” CEO Nnamdi Uba said on a call with me. The second-time founder didn’t mince words when he described HouseAfrica’s mission as back-breaking. “It might seem simple from the outside, but creating an ecosystem of trust for real estate stakeholders to engage proved to be daunting, and we had to pivot our business multiple times to align with market realities,” he said.

These shifts took HouseAfrica from its initial vision of creating an ecosystem linking financial institutions, government registries, real estate enterprises, and clientele to its present incarnation as a B2B SaaS firm offering a one-stop-shop tech suite that digitises operations for private property owners.

Uba launched HouseAfrica in 2018 with Ndifrke Ikokpu, an old friend with whom he operated the now-defunct crypto exchange, Bitpaya. The duo, friends from their undergraduate days at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, also worked in tech-related roles at MTN Group before deciding to bring their business ideas to life on the blockchain. “We shut down Bitpaya because we wanted to focus on HouseAfrica; we saw tremendous potential in addressing Africa’s trillion-dollar real estate market,” Uba said.

Uba's sincerity notwithstanding, it’s plausible the duo were going ahead of their time by launching a crypto exchange in 2016—when crypto lacked significant adoption on the continent. A 2017 study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance portrays the overall adoption of crypto, and blockchain products in Africa as being critically low. “There are very few concrete cases of the use of or adoption of blockchain technology in Africa,” reads another 2017 report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. While outliers like the 2013-founded Bitpesa exist, the promise of scale for Africa-native crypto solutions was not tangible to most until 2019. For context, Africa listed its first native crypto exchange on CoinMarketCap in 2022.

Finding Product-Market Fit

From the outset, Uba and Ikokpu shared a clear plan for HouseAfrica: to concretise trust and instill a sense of security in real estate transactions on the continent. But the journey to this has been fraught with challenges that have made the path more circuitous than linear, resulting in the company spending the better time of its existence finding product market fit.

HouseAfrica’s initial model made it an aggregator of some sort. It sought to onboard banks, real estate valuers and developers, government registries, and refinancers, such as the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC), onto a platform accessible to everyday clients seeking to buy property, access mortgages, and confirm land titles. If fully executed, this play, dubbed Propvat, would have plugged the company into the nerve centre of the African property market, owing to the trust, ease, and security the solution offers, while fulfilling blockchain’s long-touted promise of verifying land ownership.

“We knew we had to pivot when all the elements were not coming together. While negotiations with real estate valuers were protracted, some state registries took forever to close partnerships, and our product remained in limbo. This brought us back to the drawing board and Sytemap was born,” Uba said, maintaining that his company has now found a product fit for the African market.

Satellite and blockchain: a match made for users

Sytemap represents the company’s shift to cater to the market’s most responsive category of stakeholders: private enterprises. Despite their significant size, many of these businesses still rely on traditional brick-and-mortar models that result in operational inefficiencies. “Most local real estate companies are not digitally optimised,” Uba said. “But our solution suite now allows them to properly manage their business, agents, and clients in one place, and without any gaps.”

Sytemap’s APIs enable real estate developers to showcase their lands or houses in a way that grants potential clients access to a satellite view of the real estate. Clients essentially pay for a digital representation of the property, thereby earning access to the real-life asset. This play enables instant land allocation and eliminates the rife possibility of oversubscribed sales, which often results in forcing buyers to accept alternative land sites—a disappointing experience which is still a best-case scenario. At the other end of the possibilities spectrum is the complete disappearance of the real estate company, which, by then, could be short on land but high on folks’s money. At purchase, Sytemap’s system immediately settles intermediaries (agents) if there are any, eliminating the wait time for payment reconciliation, and mints an NFT for the buyers to verify their ownership and title-ship of the property.

“Our solution is a game changer for Africans in the diaspora, who are most prone to land scams due to distance and communication barriers. We will enable them access to properties in their home countries and eliminate fears of returning to an imaginary site,” Uba said. Indeed, scams have been a staple for diasporans sending money home for land projects, leading to their growing hesitation with local real estate. Trust-enabling solutions like Sytemap have the potential to break into and dominate the untapped multi-billion dollar market segment.

In addition to the satellite-enhanced e-commerce play, Sytemap provides analytics to businesses, enabling them to track key metrics and make informed decisions. This is in addition to the administrative features bundled into the software. With all these, real estate businesses plugged into Sytemap can reduce their processes by more than 50%, said Uba.

Sytemap raised $400,000 in March 2023, with participation from tech mogul Iyin Aboyeji’s Future Africa. According to Uba, the raise announcement doubled as the company’s relaunch from stealth mode. Over the past seven months, Sytemap claims to have digitised 10,944,000 sqm of land (about 16,000 plots) and allocated about 121,752 sqm of land (about 175 plots) while onboarding over 2000 agents and over 150 real estate developers, including Capital City Development, Velox, Leadway Properties, and Seman Global.

Building on-chain titles for Africa’s land projects

HouseAfrica may have paused the government-backed play that forged the startup to life, but the founders’ long-term vision suggests that it’s only going to be a temporary move. “Our strategy is to demonstrate our weight within the private sector and build enough ecosystem recognition to re-engage the government. Putting government-backed land titles on the blockchain is possible and we’ll be here to make that happen,” Uba bragged.

For now, however, the company plans to build its product and clientele until it becomes the go-to infrastructure provider for real estate developers on the continent. Uba also shared plans to expand Sytemap’s integration into real estate providers in regions like the US, Canada, and the UK where millions of Africans live. “This will enable us trap remittances in the form of housing projects capital,” Uba said.

Already the startup makes money on every transaction completed with its technology—about 0.9% per transaction capped at ₦10,000 ($10). And if the 9.27% CAGR of Nigeria’s commercial real estate sector is anything to go by, then Sytemap is positioning itself to tap into a market that will be worth almost half a billion dollars by 2028.

“We’ve barely scratched the surface. As we inch closer to our vision, a time will come when Africans will use Sytemap as the deal breaker for real estate deals. We’ll be that seal of trust for the continent’s real estate market,” said Uba.

HouseAfrica is among the portfolio companies of blockchain-focused investors CV VC and Adaverse.