Marketplace · Property Rentals
A rental marketplace where every home has been filmed inside.
Truelet lists long-let homes in Nigeria on one condition: somebody has walked through the property with a camera. No agent fees, and the price on the card is the whole price for the year.
- Product
- Truelet
- Sector
- Property rentals
The problem
Renting a home in Nigeria means paying an agent to show you places that often turn out not to exist, not to be available, or not to look anything like the photos.
Two costs sit on top of that. The advertised rent is rarely what you pay: agency fee, caution fee, legal fee and service charge appear one at a time, usually after you are already committed. And because listings cannot be trusted, viewing is physical, so finding a flat means days of travelling across a city to rule places out.
The brief was to make a listing worth believing without a visit, and to make the number on the card the number you actually pay. Everything else in the product follows from those two decisions.
What we built
A marketplace with a hard editorial rule at its centre: nothing gets listed until the inside of it has been filmed. That constraint shaped the supply side, the search, and the business model.
- 01
Video-first listings
Every home carries a walkthrough video, filmed by the owner or by Truelet, and a listing cannot go live without one. Cards show the tour length so a renter knows there is real footage behind it.
- 02
Whole-price rent
One all-in annual figure per listing, with the fees that normally surface late folded in. No agent commission sits between the renter and the price they see.
- 03
Nigerian property taxonomy
Search is built around how people here actually describe homes: self-contain, mini flat, flat, apartment, terrace, duplex, bungalow, rather than a bedroom count imported from another market.
- 04
Search and map
Filter by city, area, budget and size, with a map view for renters who are choosing a neighbourhood before they choose a home.
- 05
Area alerts
Coverage grows street by street, so renters in an area with nothing listed yet can register interest and be messaged when a home is filmed near them. Demand signal and waiting list in one.
- 06
Owner onboarding
Owners hand over a property and Truelet films it, lists it and routes the rent to their account, which is what makes the no-agent model work on the supply side.
Tech stack
Front end
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
Back end
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
The result
Truelet is live with filmed listings, whole-price rents, map and filter search, area alerts and an owner listing flow.
Building something similar?
Book a free 30-minute call. We have solved most of these problems before, and we will tell you which parts of yours are harder than they look.