KejaHunt, a web and mobile real estate listing site has finally grown up. The startup’s CEO Joshua Mutua last week went to Facebook to announce the paid house hunting than just listing properties, something Nigeria Tolet does.
According to Mutua, the shift to paid house seraches has been gradual and experimental as a number of users have been paying them to do the search and now the startup is becoming an online real estate agent not a classifieds portal for listings.
“You see, our business model was charging the landlord a standard listing fee, then providing these houses to you the tenant FREE of charge. That worked perfectly when we had a smaller market to address,” said Mutua.”Presently With a weekly inquiry and placement of 30 people, we are easily able to serve and place you in the house of your need. However, we have a large group of over a thousand people left out who we are not able to cater to due to the nature of our present business model.”
Started almost a year ago, Kejahunt has raised some seed funding from Nailab and is set to raise more to help it achieve its new mission. Mutua says Kejahunt is still focused on helping users save their time and money by going all the way to get them vacant houses for rent.
Unlike its competitors like BuyRentKenya, Anza, Nsoko, Property24 and Lamudi, Kejahunt is solely focused on the young generation who are looking for their first house after leaving campus or on campus.The site does list properties for sell but its focus is on rentals. I has a roommate feature to help tenants find roomates via Facebook matching.
This shift will help Kejahunt help young guys find houses for FREE without the hustle of using agents.
As a business we are at that critical point where we ask ourselves: to change or not to change our business model. This means we’ll be shifting to the agency model: pay us 1k or 2k to do a house search for you but maintain our integrity and the same value service you have been receiving. And seeing that you, our customer are at the core of our business, we would like to walk this journey with you.”
