The real estate market is fundamentally broken. Scams are rampant. People lose money to fake landlords and phantom listings every day. Hidden fees catch renters off guard. Agents and landlords operate with misaligned incentives, often prioritizing quick wins over client satisfaction. And information asymmetry means home seekers are almost always at a disadvantage, navigating a market where they can’t trust what they see.
This is why Coziza exists. This is why we’ve been fiercely protective of our user experience and quality of service. Providing a better service is our reason for being.
But we don’t want to just provide a better experience for one side of the market. We want to provide a better experience for both sides. Coziza is a marketplace, after all. For partner agents and landlords, the promise has been faster turnover and more cash overall. The problem is that this is fundamentally harder to showcase or prove because we’re still in the early stages of building marketplace liquidity. Coziza agents don’t yet see the benefits of the concessions they have to make like forgoing viewing fees and investing in better quality media.
Our initial approach was to create our own supply. If we couldn’t get agents to budge, we’d build our own network of landlords and ultimately demonstrate how our model was better, proving to agents that they stand to make more money by improving the quality of their listings and the user experience.
This strategy failed because, as a self-funded startup, we simply lack the capital required to make it work. We needed to find landlords, visit their properties to capture all essential media, then market and close deals ourselves. This approach essentially created a second business inside Coziza.
Remember, Coziza as a company is a listings/marketplace business. But doing it this way meant we also became a broker/agent. Given enough resources, we could have continued building this out to prove the viability of our platform, onboarded agents afterward, and slowly shut down the brokerage side of the business. But Coziza is bootstrapped and cash-constrained. This hasn’t been a viable strategy. If we want Coziza to grow and succeed, we need a better way.
So we went back to the drawing board. After hundreds of conversations with agents and landlords, one question kept surfacing: how do we remove as much friction from the supply side as possible without degrading the experience for home seekers, at least not so much that we’re no longer solving the problem we set out to solve?
We’ve spoken to about 1,000 agents and 1,000 landlords. Here’s what we learned, and what we’re going to do about it.
Agents want to get paid. They don’t want to show properties for free on the promise of a future commission that may or may not materialize. Fair enough.
The solution is to subsidize the viewing fee. We pay a reduced fee on behalf of Coziza leads. The agent gets instant money, and we make it back on shared commission. This aligns incentives across the board: our goal becomes reducing the viewing-to-deal ratio by sending over the most qualified leads. Agents get paid upfront. Home seekers get connected to serious, verified agents. Everyone wins. We can revisit the viewing fee again once we have demonstrated enough value to agents.
Right now, because we have to do manual verification checks and onboarding, including taking high-quality photos, we propose a 40/60 commission split with agents for every deal closed. There’s pushback here, understandably. The first thing to do is reduce our portion of the agent’s earnings as much as possible.
We’re going to build an app that allows agents to onboard themselves. It will walk them through guided verification and photography, taking scans we can use to simulate 360 virtual tours. With this software-based solution to onboarding and verification, we can finally move away from a revenue share model to a flat listing fee. That means agents keep more of what they earn.
In the meantime, we’ll offer tiered commission splits to reward volume. One listing? 40/60 split. Five listings? 30/70. And so on. This incentivizes bigger agents to list with us and gives smaller agents a clear path to better terms. We expect a significant uptick in listings from this combined with the viewing fee payouts, which means we’ll need to invest more in verification and onboarding capacity.
Coziza needs to start building a community of agents. Not just as users of our platform, but as partners in reshaping how real estate works in Ghana. We’ll do this by offering resources, education, and support. We’ll create, manage, and grow social media groups and pages where agents can learn, share, and connect with each other.
Coziza will increase its efforts in building SaaS-based management tools for landlords and agents. Tools to help them manage and grow their businesses. Think tenant management, payment tracking, listing analytics. These tools add value on their own while naturally funneling users into the Coziza ecosystem.
We’re not waiting around. Viewing fee subsidies go into effect immediately. The tiered commission structure rolls out right away. Within a month, we’ll release MVP onboarding and verification tools so agents can self-serve. A month after that, we’ll ship the first wave of SaaS tools for landlords and agents.
This is the next chapter for Coziza. We’ve learned a lot from what didn’t work, and we’re confident this approach sets us up to finally unlock the supply side at scale without compromising on what makes Coziza worth building in the first place.