Founder and Managing Director, Trustcrow, Joseph Orji, tells Charles Ajunwa that the title search report product, and the property inspection report product launched recently at the company’s office in Ikoyi, Lagos, are game-changers in the property industry in Nigeria, among other issues

Your company, Trustcrow unveiled two game-changing innovations in Nigeria’s property market. Can you throw more light on this?

On Tuesday, we launched two products. The first is our title search report product, and the second is our property inspection report product. So those are two digital products within Trustcrow’s verification arsenal, essentially, for property buyers, and people who are looking to buy property. People who are looking to rent property can also use the product and these are for people in Nigeria and in the diaspora because it’s an online product, and you can pay for it anywhere in the world. We’ve built different products and it was sometime last year that we really focused on this title search report product. We put together the marketing team to achieve that. We focused on the title search report product in the fourth quarter of last year, and then in the first quarter of this year, we built up our marketing team to now take this to the market. Incidentally, as the second quarter is starting, we’re now launching and going to the market with these products.

What inspired you to launch these products? Are you looking at launching more property products?

Pain inspired us to launch these products because we have dealt in property and have been messed up, as we say here, messed up doing property transactions. And that inspired us. Those tragic incidences led us to speak to others and find out, was it only us? There are other people who have also been victims. And we found that there wasn’t one alone in this thing. Other people had been messed up, lost money, lost time,  had to go to court and gone through a lot of pain, as I mentioned. So we said, based on these problems, we feel there is a need and then what product can now fulfill that need? That’s how we developed both the title search report product to focus on title verification, and then the property inspection report to focus on validating building quality.

Can you talk about your market audience?

Our market audience: we have our primary target audience and our secondary audience. Our primary target audience are first-time homebuyers and diaspora buyers. Why? Because those two audiences are very vulnerable to property transactions. First-time homebuyers, because they haven’t done it before. They simply don’t understand the process.  Diaspora buyers, they’re not on ground. They’re further away, and they don’t understand all of the intricacies about buying property or renting property here in Nigeria. Those are our primary target audience. Our secondary audience are property investors. Why? Because they’re consistently buying and selling property. Okay, they have a need for this thing. Now, they were previously doing it in a different fashion, in a different manner, in a manual manner, and maybe they might have a team that was doing it before. But they said to themselves, I want to basically be able to do this in a more efficient manner, and perhaps also in a cheaper manner. That’s why we target first-time homebuyers and diaspora buyers primarily, and then property investors secondary.

What makes these two products unique?

The truth of the matter is that people have been doing title search reports and property inspection reports for decades. I’m sure you know some people who hire a lawyer or maybe they go down to Alausa in Ikeja themselves and do it. I know for a fact you can hire an engineer, you can go to a building and do a report. But that is the old way of doing things. What makes this unique is that it’s a more modern way of transacting and getting what you want. Why? Because it’s online. You don’t have to talk to anybody. You can do it whether from Maryland in Ikeja, or Maryland, U.S. You can do it at 11 o’clock at night from your own home. So it’s all online and it’s streamlined and it’s efficient.

Everything is there. You don’t have to negotiate with anybody. All the services are there. You pay with your card or pay via transfer. Somebody sees the order, picks up the order, fulfills the order, uploads the respective report on your dashboard within 24 business hours if there is no issues in Lagos State, for the title search report. So, it’s more accessible, and we’re also trying to make it more affordable as well. The base package for the title search report is N100,000. So it gives you the protection, gives you the access, and it gives you the affordability.

What about security of these products from hacking and cyber attacks?

We don’t have a payment gateway. We leverage on the existing payment gateways that are proficient in this.

So domestically, we leverage on Paystack and MoneyFi. MoneyFi is MoneyPoint’s payment gateway. Internationally, we leverage on Stripe for our domestic customers. These are large billion-dollar companies that have, frankly, some of the best payment gateways on the planet. Stripe is a $60 billion company, and it actually owns Paystack. When you’re paying online for our products, you’re paying through those gateways. And these guys handle millions of transactions daily. So we’re not using ragtag or unverified kind of products. These are corporate products that we use.

What are your short term and long-term vision?

Short-term, we want to be very focused on what we’re trying to accomplish. Verification tools that help buyers to authenticate the property they’re looking at buying before they actually spend their money. Tools that protect them by verifying and authenticating title and verifying  and authenticating build quality. So we want to be very clear. We’re building online tools that you can use to verify the property transaction. And we’re building these tools for Nigerians, for first-time property buyers, domestically, and diaspora buyers internationally. That’s short-term. We want to be known as a company that has your back. These guys are for buyers. They’re not even trying to hide it. They’re not saying they’re for sellers and buyers. No. We unapologetically are trying to have the back of buyers to help them, give them arsenals and tools to fight back against property fraudsters. We want to be very clear about that. Long-term, we want to be the infrastructure that you use to transact with it. What do I mean by that? So the infrastructure is where you come to start and conclude your transaction. Because you can’t buy property if you can’t find property.

You mean one-stop shop?

Yes, a one-stop shop. End-to-end platform. So, as I said, you can’t verify a property if you don’t have a property. We’ll build the search platform. We already have something that we’re working on. It’s more in the alpha stage. Later on, we’re going to launch that product. And it’s not going to have quantity of property. It’s going to have quality of property. It has title, it has sellers or track record, so on and so forth. So you start on our platform. You start by searching for property. After you’ve found something you like, you now use our verification tools to authenticate that property. And then later on, being able to purchase that property on our platform. We can search, verify, and purchase end-to-end. That’s what we’re looking to build on. In this type of business, you have need for collaboration from other entities. The truth of the matter is, as a technology company, we’re builders. We use technology, to connect people. Our entire business model is collaboration. Number one, we collaborate with law firms. As I mentioned, we don’t do Tesla. That’s why I say we’re like Uber for Tesla drivers. Uber connects you to a driver. We connect you to a law firm. So we collaborate with not just law firms, but law firms that specialise in property. Probably do buildings.

We also collaborate with the inspectors, the engineers, the civil engineers, the electrical engineers, and the mechanical engineers that do the property inspection. We also collaborate with our financial gateways that help us collect money both domestically and internationally. Also on the inspection reports, we have to collaborate with the land registry because that’s where we actually go to view our reports. All of our legal partners have those relationships with the land registry to be able to go and quickly do reports because we promise people 24 business hours after we receive all the information we need. Because if you don’t give us all the information, we have to come back to you and tell you this and that. So we collaborate from beginning to end.

What is your take on the real estate industry in Nigeria?

The real estate industry is one of the biggest industries in Nigeria, because if you look at people’s purchases, what’s the largest purchase you’ll ever make in your lifetime? It’s property. And also if you look at some of these remittances, what are the largest remittances that Nigerians in the aspect make? It’s property. So, I mean, frankly, it’s one of the most impactful sectors in our lives.  It also creates a lot of jobs. On the construction site, you can have 20 people in a small site. If it’s a large site, you can have 200 people. So, it brings in a lot of money. It employs a lot of people. Typically your biggest asset in your network and it’s very fundamental. That’s why what we’re doing right now is very important, to clean it up. If there’s more trust in the system, more happy people buy more. If there’s less trust, they will go elsewhere. Bring down the economy, bring down remittances, bring down jobs. So if you want to help boost your economy, have property infrastructure that just makes it very clean and just makes it very clever for people to buy property. You’ll see what will happen to your economy.

How do one order a report on your platform?

To order a report on our platform, we will need some information from you. At the barest minimum, we need a title number. Once you input that title number, you can use that. If you don’t have a title number, it gets more difficult. You might have to supply some other information. Maybe you might have a survey, and maybe that survey might have some other information in it. We just have to do some investigative work to pull out something that’s unique to that property to be able to do it. But once we have that information, whether it’s a title number or some other information, we can now use that to do our report. If you have an address, you just have to include it. Can you use that? Sometimes that may be possible, sometimes it may not be possible because, you know, some new properties, maybe it’s a piece of land, might not have a registered address. So what we’re trying to do is just basically be able to have something that the person who wants to order, it’s easy for them to be able to have at the barest minimum, to be able to input in our system so we can use that to find the property.

What are your projections in the next 10 years?

Being the operating system for property transactions. You have an operating system for your laptop, but what’s the operating system for property? There is none. On your laptop, you can create Word documents, you can create Excel, you can use WhatsApp on your laptop, you can talk on the phone, and so on and so forth. But there is no operating system for property. Property is still operating in the very old-school manner. Now, the way that you accomplish that grand 10-year vision is by not thinking grand, but thinking very small, focused, and narrow. Doing one thing, starting with verification, adding search on top of the property platform, and adding other things on top of that. Because if you think about what you do, how do you pay your rent? It’s old-school fashion. But think about it, the platform is just connected with your bank, money just goes there. Where is your lease for your house? You know what I mean? So if you can imagine a platform that just stores everything, you just have to go for that. That’s what we’re looking at.

What would you be saying to your would-be clients?

I would say that, you know, it costs you N200 million to buy a house. It costs you N100,000 for a title inspection report from Trustcrow. And it costs you a few hundred thousand Naira for an inspection report from Trustcrow. If you look at the risk versus the return, I think it’s safe to say that you have actually nothing to lose. On the grand scheme of things, I would also argue it costs you nothing. It’s almost free. I don’t even know what N100,000 or N200 million is. It’s almost free. So if you worked for that money, if it’s hard-earned money,  the money that it would cost you to protect yourself is not much.

Would I be right to say that yours is more or less an interventionist services kind of business?

Yes, 100 per cent, because if you purchase it, you see something that’s wrong. It’s a don’t-go-there kind of situation. As you said, it helps to intervene, it helps to authenticate, it helps to validate and it helps to verify. Because as I said, we provide intelligence. 

You mean background check?

Yes. If my wife was looking at hiring some staff for the house, some domestic staff, she had to do a background check to allow that person to come inside your house and to be with your child. So would you not conduct a background check for your N200 million life savings? You do a background check for a driver for a car that’s N20 million. Would you not do it? We do background checks for staff. The staff salary is not N200 million. It’s a N100,000 background check for your N200 million property.

The world today is embracing artificial intelligence (AI). Are thinking along this line?

We are. Imagine this. We go to our platform, we go to Trustcrow and say, I have N10 million already and I want a one bedroom. What are my options? And then it brings up options for rent. I have N200 million. I want to live in Lekki. What are the options? I don’t say what part of Lekki. So we’re working on that. But like you said, that’s the future. I want to buy a property. I’m a developer with track record. I don’t want issues. Which options or sellers do I have?Because we’ve built a database of over 800 units. We’re qualifying sellers based on track record and what their customers are saying about them. So we’re going to rank them. So soon on our site, when we launch this platform, I’ll tell you about the property search platform. Property Marketplace. What you’ll see is one, two, three main streets. You’ll see three badges. You know, red, yellow, green. This one has red and yellow.  And it has red and yellow because maybe it doesn’t have a build permit yet. You know, four out of five stars. The developer has four out of five stars. That’s what his sellers have been rating him. And you see their comments. I delivered a property six months late. But, you know, he’s a decent guy. He tried. It was just because of, you know, Nigeria. This guy’s a criminal, stay away from him. The guy has 1.5 stars. The guy, you know, 10 years ago, I paid for this. You see badges, red, yellow, green badge, like a verified badge. If you see green, it has everything. And then you see the ratings and reviews. So eventually, you know, we’ll get there. We’re not telling you to buy the property or sell the property. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re not telling you to buy the property. We’re giving you intelligence so you can use your full chest. I want to buy this. I’ve seen the issue. Don’t worry. I’ll chest it. I know how to get around it. It’s all about intelligence.