We spent the first half of 2025 talking to estate agents, buyers, and renters in Harare before writing a line of code. What we found is that the problem was not that there was nowhere to list property. Portals already existed. Agents knew them, buyers used them, and they worked well enough as classifieds: post a property with a price and a contact number, and whatever comes back comes back. The problem was what happened after that. An agent managing twenty active listings would get forty enquiries in a week and find that most of them were from people nowhere near ready to transact. Window shoppers, people who had not confirmed their budget, people who were interested in principle but had a timeline measured in years. The serious buyer was in there somewhere, but the agent had no way to identify them before investing time in the conversation. So they either responded to everyone, which was exhausting, or responded to no one promptly, which cost them deals. The buyer side was equally broken. Someone trying to decide between a property in Greendale and one in Mount Pleasant could not find the information they actually needed in any listing: how reliable is power in this specific location, is the borehole functional and what does it yield, what do residents actually think of the suburb, what is nearby. That information either did not exist in one place or required the agent to volunteer it, which they would not always do because it could complicate a sale. The classifieds model was not broken. It was just the wrong category for what both sides of the market actually needed. What was missing was a real estate system: one that qualified buyer intent before a lead reached an agent, held listings to a data standard that served the buyer's decision, matched active buyer briefs to new listings automatically, and delivered that match through WhatsApp, where agents already work. We were not trying to replace what already existed. Agents on the existing portals should stay on them. What we built is what we believed the conversation between a serious buyer and a qualified agent should look like, if the platform serving both was designed around that outcome rather than around listing volume. Propertyzone launched in late February 2026. We are not claiming to be the best option or the biggest. We are claiming to be designed around a different set of priorities: quality data for the buyer, educated buyers for the agent, and a platform that earns trust through what it delivers rather than what it promises. That is the problem we were trying to solve. It is still the problem we are working on.

Propertyzone

Transparency beyond the description

Transparency beyond the description