How Sokari Gillis-Harry Is Rebuilding African Proptech with Roofteller

Over the last decade, countless startups across Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra have launched with the same playbook: build a consumer-facing listing platform, aggregate rental properties, disintermediate agents, and promise tenants a frictionless apartment hunt.

On paper, the thesis sounds obvious. Urban housing across Africa’s major commercial hubs is chaotic, opaque, and laden with high agency fees. Yet, platform after platform enters the Startup Graveyard or quietly pivots into oblivion.

The structural flaw is not a lack of market demand; it is a fundamental misunderstanding of power dynamics and unit economics. In supply-constrained rental markets, building for the tenant first is an expensive race to the bottom.

When Sokari Gillis-Harry set out to build in the real estate space, he initially walked down that familiar path. But after confronting the harsh math behind consumer marketplace dynamics, he shut down early experiments to rethink the model from first principles.

The result is Roofteller (formerly Tenalet)—a product engineered not to aggregate consumer listings, but to solve the root problem that stalls African rental transactions: underwriting risk for the asset owner.

The Mirage of the Tenant-First Marketplace

The graveyard of African proptech is filled with two-sided directories that burned significant capital attempting to acquire renters.

The unit economics of a tenant-first platform are notoriously brutal:

• High CAC vs Low Frequency: Acquiring a consumer in a competitive digital market costs real money. Yet, a tenant only rents once every one to two years. Once a lease is signed, the platform's lifetime value (LTV) stalls while customer acquisition cost (CAC) remains high.
• The "Disintermediation" Fallacy: Early proptech founders viewed real estate agents as middlemen ripe for elimination. In reality, agents exist because landlords need an offline buffer to manage physical viewings, vet prospects, and handle defaults.
• Misplaced Leverage: In high-demand cities like Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, landlords do not struggle to find prospective tenants. Vacancies in prime areas fill quickly. The primary bottleneck is not discoverability; it is trust.

When Sokari and his early collaborators analysed the unit economics of a consumer-focused solution years ago, the numbers simply did not scale.

"When we ran the numbers, it wasn’t adding up. Customer acquisition cost meant it wasn't something you could do at scale," Sokari explains. Rather than burning capital on an unviable model, they walked away to wait for a clearer signal.

Understanding the Landlord's Core Fear

The pivot toward Roofteller began with an observation about how landlords actually operate. Landlords view real estate as an investment asset, not a full-time operational job. They want recurring yield with minimal operational friction.

"Landlords don’t want to talk to you. They are your investors," notes Sokari. "They see rentals as a side business. If it takes their time, they will not do it. All they want is for the rent alert to drop."

Because there has historically been no standardised data infrastructure to evaluate tenant reliability, landlords resort to extreme, manual vetting processes.

Sokari experienced this directly when moving to Abuja. Finding an apartment he liked, he discovered the landlord lived in Port Harcourt. Rather than relying on documentation, the landlord insisted on an in-person meeting before approving the lease.

"The whole meeting was just an assessment of affordability. He just wanted to know if I could pay his rent on time, but he had to drag me across states. All he wanted was proof, but he had to come up with his own means: sitting you down, grilling you on where you work, and checking your history."

Across Nigeria, this informal due diligence takes many shapes—from cross-city interrogations to demanding expensive retainers with private lawyers to vet prospects. The market operated with high friction because nobody had built institutional trust into the transaction.

The Tactical Playbook: Infrastructure Over Aggregation

Instead of building another listing marketplace, Sokari focused on building financial verification rails directly for property owners and managers.

To avoid the bloat that sinks many early-stage platforms, Roofteller stripped its minimum viable product down to a focused scope: automated income verification and compliant credit checks.

[ Landlord / Property Manager ]

│

│ (Sends single verification link)

▼

[ Prospective Tenant ]

│

│ (Grants secure API access)

▼

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│ Roofteller Verification Engine │

├──────────────────────┬───────────────────────┤

│ Open Banking (Mono) │ Soft Credit Bureaus │

│ - Income stability │ - Zero credit-score │

│ - Cash-flow patterns │ penalty checks │

└──────────────────────┴───────────────────────┘

│

▼

[ Verified Underwriting Report to Landlord ]

Building this required solving complex regulatory and compliance hurdles that earlier platforms had bypassed:

• Soft vs. Hard Inquiries: In traditional credit ecosystems, lenders pull "hard checks," which signal loan distress and ding the consumer's credit score. Roofteller structured compliant non-lender "soft checks" that extract risk indicators without impacting the tenant’s financial standing.
• Open Banking Integration: By tapping into open-banking infrastructure like Mono alongside traditional credit bureaus, the platform gives landlords clear visibility into real-time income verification rather than relying on easily manipulated PDF bank statements.
• Low-Friction UX: Instead of requiring landlords to download heavy enterprise software, Roofteller lets them send a single digital link to prospective tenants. The tenant grants permission, the infrastructure pulls verified data, and the landlord receives an underwriting report within minutes.

By narrowing the initial scope to tenant screening, Roofteller bypassed the high CAC of consumer marketplaces. Landlords and property managers naturally bring prospective tenants onto the platform for verification, creating a built-in distribution loop.

The Strategic Lesson for African Tech Founders

Roofteller’s journey provides a critical blueprint for founders operating in African vertical SaaS and proptech:

1. Follow the Economic Leverage

If your product tries to empower a stakeholder with zero market leverage, adoption will be an uphill battle. In supply-constrained emerging markets, prioritise the asset owner or the entity controlling the capital flow.

2. Solve Non-Consumption and Risk First

African markets rarely lack demand; they lack mechanisms to mitigate transaction risk. The most defensible businesses build the underlying verification, escrow, and identity rails that enable trustless transactions.

3. Narrow the MVP Scope

Many proptech platforms fail by trying to be everything at once: property manager, legal advisor, listing site, and payment gateway. Unbundling a complex problem into a single, high-utility operational tool (e.g., automated affordability screening) builds immediate trust and opens the door for broader infrastructure expansion later.

By moving away from the consumer listing trap, Roofteller is demonstrating that the future of African real estate tech is not about showing more apartments; it is about making property transactions safe, compliant, and data-driven for the people who own them.

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