Kenyan startup e-Kodi is readying for full launch, planning to shake up the real estate market with its property listing and management platform.
While e-Kodi does provide a property listings site for rentals and sales, the startup goes a step further by providing a full suite of management services to streamline the rental process.
“There is a gap in the property management market since most agents and owners still use offline stand-alone software, or paper-based methods,” says co-founder Dennis Ochieng.
“We give agents a listing site to get tenants, and a management dashboard to manage the tenancy.”
In addition to browsing and custom search functions, the e-Kodi platform provides advanced features such as tenancy tracking – making it possible to accept a tenancy and manage the related admin online; incident tracking, allowing the property manager to monitor the current state of the property; waiting lists for give properties; an e-lease service; e-payments which provides an automated invoicing system as well as being integrated for mobile money payments.
“e-Kodi is disrupting the norm in property management, by making it easy for tenants to get desired places, for owners to manage their properties, and for agents to list and get more business,” Ochieng says.
The platform has so far been in beta mode, as the e-Kodi team develops and tests new features. The service is currently being trialled two agents and two landlords across their multiple tenants. Ochieng says the response so far has been “even better than our expectations”.
As such, the startup is readying for a full-scale launch by July.
Ochieng says when fully operational, the platform will have six different revenue streams, ranging from advertising and featured listings, to subscription fees for the management platform, and the sale of anonymised real estate market data.
Nonetheless, as the startup has so far been self-funded by the founders, Ochieng says raising seed funding is an imminent priority; and the team is also looking for mentors to help with the on-going development of the business.
Ochieng envisages a busy road ahead. He says the real estate space in Kenya is ripe for disruption, having failed so far to incorporate tech tools which offer substantial benefits to all actors in the property market.
“We believe that real estate has been lagging behind since most of users have been content with the status quo. That’s why listing sites are just that, for now. e-Kodi is here to disrupt that, by introducing more services to the property hunter, the owner and the manager.”
