Oscar Danladi founded Rentstay to address Nigeria’s chaotic rental market after becoming frustrated by misleading listings and excessive agency fees. His platform aims to streamline the rental process by enabling direct tenant-landlord interactions, verifying properties, and offering digital caution-fee management. Rentstay seeks to transform how rentals work, ensuring transparency for both parties.

Fwangmun Oscar Danladi had done everything right. He had found a listing, confirmed a price, and arranged a viewing. The apartment, a two-bedroom flat in Jos, had decent road access, reasonable rent, and looked promising on paper. Then he arrived, and the agent asked him to wait.

“He needed to call someone else who knew where the property was,” Danladi recalls.

What followed was a slow unravelling. One agent became two, then three. Each new arrival got into Danladi’s car and directed him further down a road that bore no resemblance to what had been described. By the time they reached the property, Danladi had been in the car for the better part of an hour. The house was nothing close to what he had asked for.

Then came the real surprise: despite all of this, the agents still expected to be paid an amount more than the initial agreement, because “more people had gotten involved.”

Danladi is not the kind of person to write off a bad experience. Instead, he started asking questions. Why does renting in Nigeria require navigating an arduous path laden with unnecessary middlemen and agents? Why is a ₦500,000 apartment so often actually a ₦900,000 apartment, once agency fees, legal fees, and caution fees are piled on? Why is there no system?

“It just dawned on me,” he says. “This is what almost everybody goes through.”

Nigeria has a housing problem that its property market has largely failed to solve. The country’s urban population is expanding at roughly 2.8% to 3% annually, and demand for rental accommodation in cities like Lagos, Abuja, and Jos continues to outpace the supply of quality, verifiable listings. Sadly, this deficit is both physical and structural.

The informal networks that dominate Nigeria’s rental market, where a tenant finds an agent who knows an agent who knows a landlord, with fees accumulating at every handshake, have remained largely unchanged for decades. Technology has made its way into fintech, logistics, agrotech, and healthcare. Rental housing, for the most part, has been left behind.

A handful of startups have tried to close the gap. RentSmallSmall pioneered the rent-in-instalments model in Lagos. PropertyPro.ng built a listings aggregator. But outside the major southern cities, the informal system still holds. In a city like Jos, the kind of multi-agent chaos Danladi experienced is not a bug but a feature.

Danladi’s response was to spend months in research mode, mapping the problem before building a solution. RentStay.

Together with Jonah Onah and Abel Ochika, Danladi co-founded Rentstay, a rental platform designed, as he describes it, not just to list properties but to restructure how the entire rental transaction works.

“The system allows the tenant to go in, create an account, and you can verify your identity during registration. The property owner also has a dashboard where he can create a property listing. We then verify the property by doing background checks on th property to ensure transparency. Tenants can directly chat with the property owner via our platform,” Danladi says.

The most immediate promise is zero agency fees. Rather than paying agents to unlock access to viewings, users interact directly with landlords through the platform, where properties are listed, digitally managed, and verified before they go live.

The verification model is where Rentstay departs from the usual proptech playbook. Rather than relying purely on document checks, the platform uses a network of local affiliates who function a bit like traditional agents but with a different mandate. Their job is to confirm that a property physically exists and matches its description. They are paid for that confirmation, not for closing a deal.

It’s a subtle structural shift, but the incentive change matters. A traditional agent profits when a transaction closes, regardless of whether the tenant is satisfied. Rentstay’s affiliates profit when information is accurate. Whether that holds at scale is a question the platform has not yet had to answer.

The more unusual piece of Rentstay’s model is what it does with the caution fee
The more unusual piece of Rentstay’s model is what it does with the caution fee.

In Nigeria, caution fees, sometimes called cushion fees, are a standard part of the rental process. Tenants pay a lump sum upfront, meant to cover potential damage, and routinely struggle to recover it when they move out. The money sits idle, earns nothing, and is often the subject of disputes.

Rentstay holds caution fees digitally and invests them through what Danladi describes as insured financial channels. Tenants earn a 5% annual return on that deposit. When they leave — assuming the property is in good condition — they get back both the original amount and the interest it accumulated.

“You’re renting, but you’re also earning” – Danladi Oscar

For landlords, the platform offers a different value proposition: structure. Tenant verification, automated payment tracking, and property management tools are bundled together, which is an appealing pitch for landlords who currently manage everything through phone calls and paper receipts. Getting them to actually use it is the harder part.

Danladi is straightforward about this. Older landlords, accustomed to dealing in cash and relationships, will not convert overnight. The strategy is incremental: start with early adopters, let results travel by word of mouth, and where needed, lean on younger family members already comfortable with digital platforms to bring the older generation along.

Rentstay launched in Jos in March 2026, which is a deliberate choice. The platform’s founders are from there, knows its contours, and is realistic about the limits of dropping a new product into a market without roots. And already, the site visits show promise with hundreds of new users indicating interest in RentStay.

The five-year target is 2,500 properties under management. Danladi calls it modest, and it is, relative to the size of Nigeria’s housing market. But he frames the goal less as a number and more as a proof of concept. If Rentstay can shift how tenants and landlords in Jos think about the rental relationship, the larger cities become easier to enter.

The harder questions are still ahead. Fake listings are endemic in Nigerian proptech, and no amount of affiliate verification eliminates the possibility of fraud — it only adds friction. Maintaining landlord engagement on the platform, rather than reverting to direct deals once they’ve found a tenant, is a problem every Nigerian proptech startup has encountered. And the caution fee investment model, while compelling on paper, introduces financial risk that will need regulatory clarity as the platform scales.

None of this makes Rentstay’s ambition unreasonable. It makes it difficult in the specific, familiar ways that building in Nigeria is always difficult.

Danladi drove nearly an hour on a bad road to reach a house that didn’t match its description, and at the end of it, agents still asked for more money. That experience sits at the centre of what Rentstay is trying to solve — not by making housing frictionless, which may be too much to promise, but by making it at least legible. A market where tenants know what they’re paying for, and landlords know who they’re dealing with.

“There are properties, but there’s no system” – Danladi Oscar

Rentstay is his attempt to build one.