Lessons · 12 May 2026 · 1 min read
What Makkan Property Listing Taught Us About Building Marketplaces
Searching for property in Nigeria means wading through fake listings, unverified agents and slow replies. Makkan Property Listing was our answer: a marketplace where agents and listings were verified, with Agent Nuru, an AI assistant that helped buyers discover properties and get quick answers.
We built it in 2024. It went live with users. For more than a year after that, almost nobody used it. We have retired it.
What we got wrong
- A marketplace needs two sides at once. Buyers come where the listings are, and agents list where the buyers are. We built the platform before we had either side in real numbers.
- Trust is ongoing work, not a feature. A verification badge is only worth something if someone keeps doing the verifying, for every agent and every listing.
- Asking people to look somewhere new is hard. Buyers already had places they searched. We offered a better promise, but not a reason to switch that outweighed habit.
- We made big claims before we had earned them. We described the platform in the strongest terms before usage supported it.
Where the demand was
Later, a real estate company hired us to build software for its own operations: a content system, an operations dashboard and a WhatsApp lead qualification bot. That work showed us where the demand was. Real estate companies with a specific operational problem and a budget to fix it will pay for tools that solve it.
What we would do differently
- Prove demand with paying users before building the platform.
- Start with one side of the marketplace, in one small area, and win it before building for everyone.
- Let results earn the big claims.
Where this leaves us
We have retired the product and kept it in our portfolio, with the lessons beside it. The verification work and the property experience still inform how we build software for real estate and other clients.