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By Maduka Nweke
The Founder and CEO of Virety, a platform that integrates verified property listings with geospatial intelligence, Olayinka Olamilehin, has said that technology is playing a major role in the property market.
Olamilehin noted that aside from the payment system, technology is also helping to achieve precision in decision-making and save logistical costs and time.
During a recent interview with journalists, he said that statistically, the real estate market in Africa is expected to reach a value of $17.64 trillion before the end of 2025 and is projected to reach $22 trillion by 2029, showing a 6 per cent growth rate due to rapid urbanisation. He said that within this market, the residential real estate segment dominates over 75 per cent of that. Therefore, the residential market would demand more precision due to high demand and buying power. Our mission is to help people make smarter choices and gain satisfaction through the use of virtual technology, thereby elevating their choices and providing concrete value.
The Virety CEO said, “We have employed the use of fintech companies in payment, basically. And so we get to have like, okay, there’s a problem in the industry currently. And the problem is that oftentimes when people make a payment and they don’t get the service the payment was made for, they get discouraged. So there is no feedback system. There is no system where the hosts are held accountable. So with fintech, when people make a payment, we can withhold that payment till services have been given by the hosts to the guests.
“And we can now make payments to the hosts after the guests have enjoyed the services. And if there are complaints about the service, they can report to us. And in reporting, we can, because we are the ones with the help of fintech, the fintech service that we have employed, we can withhold some of the funds and put in some measures to correct whatever wrong services that have been given initially. So in some cases, we might need to ban the host from our platform. We might need to suspend the host from our platform. We might need to even refund the host for their service, of the money that they paid for the service,” he stated.
He further stated that fintech companies are actually able to achieve that, otherwise, payments would have just gone directly, and the host would not be able to be accountable for whatever they do to the guests. He noted that as soon as the guest book makes payments, there won’t be any other control anymore, because the payment has gone, adding that with fintech now, we are able to hold the host accountable for their treatment of the guests.
Speaking on the successive Nigerian governments’ announcements on affordable housing and urban renewal initiatives without implementation and the missing point in the policy-to-execution pipeline, and how the private sector could bridge the gap sustainably, Olamilehin noted that government is responsible for providing access to affordable housing for the middle and lower-income earners. “The leadership should take accountability in ensuring the speedy delivery of affordable housing for the people. The slower the delivery, the more complicated the problem becomes due to bottlenecks created by population increase.
“For the private sector, there has been too much focus on high-profile real estate development and little concern for serving the largest economic class of society. Therefore, the private sector should engage partnerships and corporations that breed strong investments that can help speed up housing needs for the middle or low-income earners. Growing investors’ confidence, coupled with improvement in technology, has provided enough avenues to allow the common man to invest in real estate. The problem is trust. We already have a system that is working, but the question is whether we can trust the system? Proper regulatory and licensing measures can be introduced to build trust and avoid scams.
“Infrastructure is the bedrock of a profitable real estate economy. However, it has no direct effect on the digital housing market. What is required is that the digital housing market provides transparency and accurate depictions of what is on the ground. The advantage the digital housing market has is access to data, which can be used to help the government better understand the industry’s needs, providing a roadmap for infrastructural development,” he concluded.
