The frustration that comes along with house hunting, conversing with agents and finally deciding to buy a property is something I am not familiar with but can only imagine how tiring it can be. An interesting startup landed on my desk just last week and they are promising to make life easier by providing a more secure and efficient way for buyers to get the property they need.
So PropertyZone is this Zimbabwean property listing platform built by a dev outfit called Sparkline Labs. It does the usual matching of property buyers and tenants with real estate agents with a bit of a twist. Neighbourhood reviews and, according to them, a tight handle on who gets to list a property. They also say they have designed the app so that agents get more qualified leads. They officially launched earlier this year in February.
PropertyZone are not alone in this market; they have to face established names like Property.co.zw, Propertybook and Property24
In their messages to us, one of the founders said about why they are working on the app: “Most listing sites here work the same way, they push as many inquiries as possible to the agent, regardless of fit. Over time agents get conditioned to a flood of low-quality inquiries from people who could have disqualified themselves before ever calling, if they’d had the right information upfront”
When you open the app, you can see how they are trying to do things differently, and honestly, it’s surprising the incumbents seem to have overlooked some of this. It’s clean, deliberately designed, and overall easy to navigate. The landing page makes it very clear that only EAC-registered (a governing body that oversees real estate practice) agencies could sell properties, prohibiting unregistered individuals from doing the same. On competitor platforms, it appears individuals can post properties.
The standout neighbourhood review feature we mentioned earlier is called “Where to Live.” This section helps buyers decide which suburb best fits their needs. It consists of a suburb ranking system for each city, determined by ZESA stability, internet services available, road quality, traffic into CBD, amenities, water and such. Each suburb has reviews and comments from community members, giving buyers a clearer, more unbiased sense of the place. Buyers or tenants looking to relocate to a suburb can also ask the community questions about the place.
I even noticed that in the section there were about 2 reviews of the place I live, Highfields. I could tell that the comments were somewhat authentic as they were very descriptive of the area in a human way and I could instantly recognise my home. This removed the skeptical thoughts I had about the reviews as I know it’s possible for someone to use AI generated text.
As useful as the Where To Live feature is, I could not help but notice some flaws with it. It’s a new platform yet to grow the number of reviews and that clearly affects the accuracy of the ranking systems. A score is a better reflection of reality when there are many reviews to aggregate. This becomes a problem especially when some places get few overly negative or generous reviews.
The rest of the features are what you’d expect and get from other property listing sites per-listing legal data, including tenure type, title deed status, and zoning. They also provide per-listing utility data showing borehole/water reliability, solar setup, ZESA/grid reliability, and internet speed. But it feels PropZone is doing this on a deeper level than the incumbents though, which was definitely a plus in my books. This makes it much easier for buyers to rule out or prioritize properties.
Propertyzone’s business model is built around agencies, not property seekers. Buyers or tenants use the platform for free while agencies have to pay to get their properties listed.This is basically the model that most of its competitors are using and from what I’ve seen it has worked perfectly so far.
According to PropertyZone they have managed to attract 16 agencies and around 132 agents since their launch in February. You can feel there are still few agents when you browse around the site. The traditional big names (Seef, Knight Frank, Guest & Tanner, Pam Golding, Pocock etc…) aren’t listed there yet. However they have not disclosed the number of successful property deals or users they have had.
In conclusion, PropertyZone claims they have introduced a safer, more convenient way for property seekers to buy or rent. However PropertyZone’s argument could collapse the instant the features that differentiate them are adopted by their competitors. The real question is whether they’ll win over enough users first, or whether competitors will copy their features before PropertyZone gets the chance to grow.
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