Roomly: the case for a trusted student housing marketplace

This is an investor-facing overview of Roomly, a student housing marketplace built for Nigerian universities, starting with FUTMINNA. If you're a student or caretaker looking for the how-to guides instead, start here.

The problem

Off-campus student housing in Nigeria runs on inspection fees, outdated listings, and prices that move depending on who's asking. A few patterns repeat often enough to count as the norm rather than the exception:

• Students pay an inspection fee per property, with no guarantee the property matches what they were shown.
• The same property can be listed at different prices on different platforms — a gap of over ₦150,000 on a single unit is not unusual.
• Listing videos are sometimes old enough that the property has changed hands, been renovated, or no longer exists in the state shown — discovered only after the inspection fee is paid.
• When demand spikes near the start of a session, prices spike with it, and units often go to the highest bidder rather than the first qualified student to commit.

This isn't a hypothetical problem. FUTMINNA's Students' Union Government issued a press release restricting the operations of student housing agents around campus, and students from universities in other regions have described the same pattern independently.

It's also visible at the institutional level. FUTMINNA's Vice Chancellor, Prof. Faruk Adamu Kuta, has publicly acknowledged the accommodation shortage more than once. At his 2022 inauguration, he stated the university — despite existing for roughly 40 years — could only accommodate 3,304 students, calling it a challenge that carries real security and welfare risk given how many students end up housed off campus. Then in July 2025, he raised it again, calling on investors to help close the gap, which prompted the university to stand up a formal Public-Private Partnership unit for exactly that purpose. That's a scarcity problem the institution itself has confirmed and is actively trying to solve — the same scarcity that gives off-campus agents room to extort.

(A note on numbers: internal estimates put current usable hostel capacity closer to 1,000–2,000 beds, a lower figure than the VC's 2022 count. Some hostel capacity has been added since — a 110-bed hostel was commissioned in late 2025, for instance — so the real current number likely sits somewhere between the two.)

The solution

Roomly is a marketplace, not another listing board. The mechanics are built to close the specific gaps above:

• Direct listings. Property owners list their own units; there's no agent layer marking up the price.
• Admin verification. Every listing is checked against the actual property before it goes live.
• Location verification. A Google Maps integration lets students confirm a property's proximity to campus without paying for an inspection.
• Escrow-backed payments, held for a 24-hour window in which a student can request a full refund if the property substantially differs from its listing.
• First-come, first-served enforcement. Once a booking starts, the unit locks for 20 minutes, which removes the "highest bidder wins" dynamic.
• Listing expiry. Properties auto-expire after 6 months without a booking, so owners have to re-list with current details rather than leave stale listings up.
• Verified reviews, submitted only by tenants who actually booked and stayed.
• Roommate matching, one ad per student account, free — replacing the "connection fee" some agents charge just to post in a WhatsApp group.

The market

FUTMINNA's total student enrollment, across undergraduate and postgraduate programs, stands at about 30,000. New intake is estimated at 5,000–7,500 matriculating students per year. Set against a hostel capacity that — depending on the source — sits somewhere between roughly 1,000 and 3,300 beds, the majority of FUTMINNA's student body needs off-campus housing every year, which is the addressable wedge Roomly is starting with.

The strategy is to dominate that FUTMINNA market first, then expand to nearby institutions — Newgate, IBBUL, and Al-Hikmah University (AKU) are the initial expansion targets — before scaling across other Nigerian universities facing the same structural shortage.

Business model

Roomly charges a booking fee, tiered by property price:

The tiering keeps the fee proportionate rather than a flat tax on cheaper units, while still funding operations as the platform scales.

Where things stand

Roomly is pre-revenue and in active testing, currently running behind its original public-launch timeline. What's shipped and working so far:

• The platform is live at roomly.com.ng
• Google OAuth sign-in is fully functional
• Core flows — booking, roommate matching, withdrawals — have been built and tested end-to-end
• FUTMINNA's Students' Union Government has backed the platform
• Caretaker outreach is ongoing, with property owners being verified and onboarded
• The transactional email system is fully functional

Planned next: real-time chat, "Roomly AI," and — longer term — bringing rent payments themselves onto the platform, so pricing stays fair even after a property owner has an established base of tenants through Roomly.

Team

Roomly is currently built and run by a single founder — me. I'm the one who experienced this problem directly as a student, watched it play out on campus WhatsApp channels, and built the platform end-to-end: product, engineering, and outreach. There's no padded team slide here; what exists is one person who has shipped a working, tested platform alone, which is its own signal about execution speed once real resourcing comes in.

Guiding principles

Students first. Trust before growth. Transparency over opacity. Technology should reduce friction, not add to it. Partnerships over gatekeeping. The goal is to build infrastructure, not just software — starting at FUTMINNA, with room to become the same trusted layer for student housing across Nigeria.

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