Rent in Nigeria asks for trust nobody has earned.

The informal rental market runs on relationships and risk. If you know someone, it works. If you do not, you are asked to hand over more money than most Nigerians hold at one time to a stranger, on the strength of some photographs and an agent’s word.

Health insurance solved a version of this. An HMO sits between you and a hospital: your money is ring-fenced for healthcare, and providers are checked before they can bill against it. Nobody thinks this is a strange way to buy healthcare.

HOMEGRID applies that shape to housing. You build a Housing Wallet — a one-off top-up whenever you like, plus an automatic monthly amount you choose. Listings are inspected by a person before they go live. And the rent sits with us — not with the landlord — until the tenant and the landlord each confirm that the keys actually changed hands.

That last part is the whole product. Everything else is scaffolding around a single claim: neither party has to trust the other first, because neither party is asked to go first.