Guinea’s property market has for long been an offline affair, leading to huge gaps in the market closing out those interested din buying, selling or renting property from wherever they were.
However, two Guinean friends, Ibrahima Soumano and Anzoumana Traore, saw that as an opportunity and decided to act upon it. That’s when Tafory.com, an online property listing site was born.
Soumano and Traore met in Oxford, UK where they were both studying as international students. Soumano was a Business student at Oxford Brookes University whilst Traore aka Diddy was on an international foundation program course at the same university.
Soumano told TechMoran, “The traditional way of doing property business needed to be improved and made more efficient both for agents / private landlords and those prospective buyers / tenants. Since we launched the platform, the response has been phenomenon both from end users and our clients. It is worth mentioning that the only investment in the business so far has been to build and host the website and a very little marketing effort on SEO and social media.”
The online property site that makes searching for properties easy in Guinea by aggregating listings from different agents in the country, giving prospective tenants and buyers a large and varied selection of availability on the market and ultimately simplifying the process for them. It is evident that this segment of the market in Africa is untouched says Soumano and it is their vision to develop the culture locally and eventually grow across the continent.
“Most of our listings come from Estates agents but we do get individual landlords and property developers list from time to time.
There is no direct competition. Tafory.com is the first site with this model in Guinea. Since launch though, a couple of general listing platforms have emerged but they pause no threat to us at this point, says Soumano.
By offering a professional business solution to agents who are struggling to take their products to market and at the same time eliminating the hassle buyers and tenants go through in finding properties, which currently is costly and time consuming, Tafory aims to charge agents in future.
The new site is also working on partnerships with some most visited news site in Guinea to serve their listings on their platform.Tafory told TechMoran that it will be re-launching a beta version of the platform with more functionality and business solutions for agents and as well hire a sales team to push its monetization plans.
Though bootsrapping, Tafory says it major focus at the moment is building a proven model and sign up users and launch in neighbouring markets like Nigeria with over 160 million people. Tafory says Guinea is ready for online business but more needs to be done in educating actors of the markets – both solution providers and consumers and the need for the government and private sector to work closely to create an efficient and secure internet ecosystem.
Available in French, the site major focus will be Francophone Africa then expand to other markets steadily. Guinea has over 11 million people of which 30 percent are at he age of 25 and 54, these will be the one’s Tafory will be targeting as property hunters and agents and sellers.
Guinea’s property market has for long been an offline affair, leading to huge gaps in the market closing out those interested din buying, selling or renting property from wherever they were.