Yulom, is an online property listing service in Nigeria looking to make a strategic move into the market, offering unique value propositions against incumbents. Yulom engaged my services to help them understand the pain points in the market, identify viable opportunities and collaborate with the business to ideate and deliver a winning solution.
Speaking with stakeholders, Yulom’s Go-to-Market Strategy highlighted the increase in demand for affordable housing in urban areas especially by middle-income earners and young professionals and their inability to also access financing.
Using contextual enquires and surveys with renters, buyers and property managers; benchmarking their experience with existing incumbents, some of the key insights were:
Customer Journey Drop-offs: 89% of users use property listing sites for only the first part of their journey - viewing available properties
Cumbersome Paperwork: 94% of users complained that the paperwork involved prolongs the time it takes from finding a property to moving into the property.
Overwhelming inefficiency: Property managers with multiple property listings, are unable to manage high number of requests on their properties.
Increasing brokerage costs: Renters are consistently slighted by the increasing rates housing agents require to facilitate their rent/buy process.
Rent Financing: Renters find it difficult to access financing at commercial banks and are at the mercies other financiers at high rates.
Unverified, Fake or Duplicate Listings: There is a prevalent issue of unverified, fake or duplicate listings as well as housing scams.
After synthesising key insights from the user interviews to understand the problems, expectations and goals, I summarised the users we will be solving for into 3; Renter, Buyer and Property Manager. I also highlighted their key goals, existing frustrations and expectations.
The key objective was to identify opportunities that;