Crib Connect: A rental marketplace

I spent ₦20,000 on agent fees in 2023 and still didn’t find a house.

I was a 300-level student trying to move out of a property with a leaking roof that my landlord refused to fix. My belongings were getting damaged. I hired several agents. I was shown uncompleted buildings and asked to pay for them to be finished. I was taken to the same house by multiple agents who had no idea the others had already shown it to me. After weeks of searching, I gave up and moved back into the same room with the same leaking roof. After three weeks away from my studies hunting for a house, I had nothing to show for it.

That experience led to Crib Connect.

The Real Problem

Most people blame agents. Some blame landlords. The popular diagnosis is greed, and there’s truth in that. I approached this the way a historian would — looking at structure, not symptoms. And the conclusion I keep arriving at is that the root cause isn’t greed. It’s a near-total absence of institutional trust.

Every party in the Nigerian rental system distrusts every other party. Tenants distrust agents. Agents distrust landlords. Landlords distrust tenants. And because there’s no shared infrastructure for verification or accountability, that distrust is rational. It’s not a character problem. It’s a system problem.

The exploitation follows from there. Agents weaponize information asymmetry because information is their only leverage in a market with no rules. Agency fees as high as 20% of annual rent have been reported, paid entirely by tenants who have no alternative or recourse.

What Crib Connect Does

Crib Connect is a long-term rental marketplace for Nigeria. It addresses three things: trust, discovery, and history.

Trust is the hardest one and the one most products skip. We verify every individual on the platform using their National Identification Number. Every business — property managers, law firms, estate agencies etc, go through KYB. Agents are not allowed on the platform as individuals. If you want to list properties as an agent, you operate as a legal entity. Full stop. That single rule eliminates a large class of the informal, unaccountable behavior that makes the current market so extractive.

Discovery is the more obvious one. Both tenants looking for homes and landlords looking for tenants currently navigate a fragmented, opaque market. Centralizing that on a verified platform changes the dynamic entirely.

History is the long game. Over time, a verified, transactional history of records becomes an asset the market has never had. That’s what breaks the information asymmetry permanently

What We Cut

I wanted a lean MVP. There’s a longer product vision: a roommate finder for young professionals, additional features for property managers, other tools that make sense at scale. None of that is in the first version.

The Stack

SvelteKit [1] + TypeScript again. Same reasoning as always. Fast, controlled, no unnecessary abstraction.

SQLite [2] was an easy call. Crib Connect is a long-term letting platform. Rentals are not high-frequency transactions. Before we’re processing the kind of write volume that would stress SQLite, we’d have to be larger than every competitor on the continent combined and processing north of 400 million requests a day. Until that’s a real problem, SQLite is the right tool. Reaching for Postgres now would be engineering for an imaginary scale.

Better-Auth for identity and access management. Same reasoning as Project Eko. It’s open source, self-hosted, we hold our users’ data.

Where It Stands

The platform is still under construction. There are 500 people on the waitlist.

The problem is real and the timing is right. The build continues.

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Footnotes

[1] Find out why I use Svelte in this article. Why I chose Svelte

[2] Read this article to understand my decision on databases. Your team likely uses the wrong database

[3] Check out the project here. Click here to visit website