Ule Homes isn’t really solving rent. It’s building Nigeria’s credit system

Three times during our conversation, Azeez Abdulyekeen circles back to the same idea, almost like he’s trying to convince himself as much as anyone else: “Credit is the future for Nigeria.” Not housing, not proptech, not even mortgages. Credit. It’s an odd pitch for a company that just won TechCabal’s Battlefield competition by promising to help Nigerians pay rent monthly instead of annually. But when you look at what Ulé Homes is actually building, the housing bit starts to feel like a convenient cover for a credit play. 

Here’s what they figured out: Nigerians pay rent more reliably than they pay anything else. Eviction is social death, so even when salaries delay or businesses struggle, rent gets prioritised. That behavioural pattern—consistent, predictable, high-value monthly payments—is exactly what credit bureaus need to build creditworthiness profiles. Ule Homes isn’t really solving a housing problem. They’re creating a credit reporting system that happens to use rent as the data source.

Since August 2024, they’ve financed ₦700 million ($483,900) in rent for 179 customers, with every payment reported to their partner credit bureaus. Each monthly repayment adds to a customer’s credit history. Do it consistently for a year, and suddenly you have documented proof of financial responsibility that unlocks access to car loans, business credit, and lower interest rates. “Rather than having to pay once, pay bit by bit, and as your credit report improves, your credit score gets stronger,” Abdulyekeen explains. “You’re able to now get more access to other financial perks from other financial institutions.”

This matters because Nigeria’s credit infrastructure barely exists for most professionals. You can earn ₦500,000 monthly, have savings, pay bills on time, and still have no formal credit history. It is an all too familiar system of dearth of useful data: rent payments to landlords don’t get reported, utility payments aren’t tracked systematically, and many people avoid loans entirely. Banks underwrite based on salary verification and gut feeling. Ulé Homes is systematising the gut feeling part.

The average Ule Homes customer is financing ₦3.9 million ($26,860) in rent—about ₦325,000 ($220) monthly. In Lagos, that gets you Yaba if you work in tech, Surulere if you’re a young professional, maybe Lekki if you’re climbing a corporate ladder. In Abuja, Gwarinpa or Wuse. In Port Harcourt, Woji or Trans Amadi. These are the neighbourhoods where careers actually function—where power stays on long enough for remote work, where schools operate consistently, where you’re not burning 4 hours daily in traffic from cheaper areas. The rent isn’t a luxury tax. It’s what access to economic opportunity costs in Nigeria’s metropolitan centres.

The rent also isn’t optional. It’s the tax you pay for access to economic opportunity. And increasingly, young professionals are making a calculation: why let that ₦3.9 million disappear in one payment when you could finance it, keep capital available for business opportunities or emergencies, and build credit history in the process?

A 2024 survey found that 63% of Lagos renters still prefer paying annually over monthly instalments. The reasons are structural: pooling family resources once a year is easier than coordinating 12 payments. The upfront lump sum is a visible commitment that gives landlords confidence. And culturally, taking on debt—even instalment debt—carries stigma. But the 37% who see it differently are growing. They’re the demographic Ule is building for: people who understand that keeping ₦3.9 million liquid has value, even if it costs ₦192,000 ($130) in fees and interest.

That cost, 2.9% facilitation fee plus 1.7-2% monthly interest, works out to roughly 20-24% Annual Percentage Rate (APR), similar to personal loans from Nigerian banks. Which raises the obvious question: if you qualify for Ule’s credit checks, why not just get a bank loan?

“The bottleneck sometimes is just around verification,” Abdulyekeen says. The value isn’t cheaper money. It’s not visiting a bank branch three times, waiting two weeks for approval, then manually transferring to your landlord while hoping the loan officer doesn’t ghost you. Ule Homes pays landlords directly, sets up automatic debit via Mono and Paystack, and customers never touch the money. For people trading time against the ₦192,000 in fees, it works.

But there’s a deeper play here. Rent financing is the entry point. Credit infrastructure is the foundation. Mortgages are the destination.

Turning renters into owners

In August 2025, Ule launched mortgage financing through MREIF, the Ministry of Finance Real Estate Investment Fund. The terms: up to ₦100 million ($per property at 9.75% annual interest over 20 years). In a market where commercial mortgages run 18–25% and the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN)’s 6% subsidised rates are buried under bureaucracy most people can’t navigate, 9.75% is genuinely disruptive.

A ₦60 million ($41,000) mortgage at that rate runs about ₦581,000 ($397) monthly. At Ulé’s 30% debt-to-income ceiling, that requires monthly income around ₦1.94 million ($1,326,900.) That’s not everyone, but it’s not rare either—senior roles at banks, tech companies, oil and gas, consulting firms. People already paying ₦400,000 ($270) monthly in rent with nothing to show for it. The mortgage product recasts that payment as equity-building: same monthly outflow, but you’re buying the property instead of enriching a landlord.

“Just imagine when people buy cars on instalments,” Abdulyekeen says. “You get to buy the car, but you pay on an instalment basis before you own it. That’s how we’re trying to re-imagine mortgage. You get to live in this apartment, so rather than paying for rent, you’re paying towards ownership.”

The MREIF capital exists—government money sitting in commercial banks—but access is deliberately cumbersome. “What MREIF does is the money sits with commercial banks,” Abdulyekeen explains. 

“You don’t get the houses, just the finance sometimes, and there’s a lot of processes individuals might not like. What we’re doing is demystifying those processes. We approach the developers or owners of the house who are willing to sell, and we provide the finance.”

Ule Homes partners with developers for inventory, handles the MREIF application bureaucracy, manages property verification, and presents customers with turnkey mortgage options. They’re at the “tail end” of disbursing their first mortgage customers. If it works—if even 10% of rent financing customers with documented payment history convert to mortgages—the unit economics shift completely. Mortgages are larger tickets, longer tenures, and every payment feeds back into credit reporting, strengthening financial profiles that unlock additional products.

This is the credit infrastructure thesis in action: capture payment data through rent, use that data to qualify customers for mortgages, use mortgage payments to further build credit profiles, then leverage those profiles for car loans, business credit, and lower interest rates on everything. Housing is the wedge. Credit is the moat.

The timing matters. Across Africa, proptech funding jumped to 6.2% of total startup capital in H1 2025. Egypt’s Nawy raised $75 million and processes $3 billion in gross merchandise value across brokerage, financing, and fractional ownership. South African VC firm REdimension closed $10 million specifically for proptech. The sector is having a moment, but the winners aren’t solving housing directly—they’re solving data and infrastructure problems. Nawy built a full-stack platform. South Africa’s Flow created API infrastructure connecting 4,500 estate agents to social media lead generation and is now expanding to Australia’s $9 trillion housing market. Ulé is building credit rails.

Read also: African startups raised $1.2 billion in H1 2025 as funding rebounds

Surviving by owning nothing

The founders studied what killed previous Nigerian proptech startups. Spleet tried owning and managing properties end-to-end. Carbon launched housing products, then scaled back. Others tried intermediating landlord-tenant relationships directly. All hit the same walls: operational complexity, capital intensity, market resistance.

“We saw that most proptech tried to own the end-to-end, the apartment, the finances, the property management,” Abdulyekeen says. “When they’re doing all of that, it takes enormous operations.

Ulé doesn’t hold properties, manage landlords, or disburse from their own balance sheet. Money flows from seven financial partners—banks and neobanks—directly to landlords. Repayments go back to those partners. The company charges the facilitation fee and earns a margin on the interest spread. “We don’t see ourselves as a lender,” Abdulyekeen says. “We’re aggregators.”

That positioning sidesteps lending regulation for now, though they’re working on their own license. It’s standard fintech arbitrage—operate as a platform while partners hold licenses—and it buys time to prove the model.

The asset-light approach means their main constraint is customer acquisition and verification, not capital. Each customer needs KYC checks, bank statement analysis, landlord verification, credit bureau pulls, and employment confirmation. Over 14 months, they’ve averaged 13 customers monthly. The default rate is zero. “We do ethical borrowing,” Abdulyekeen says. “Whenever we see slight issues—this person borrowed before and didn’t pay back—we don’t go ahead unless there’s a reason.” Direct debit via Mono and Paystack automates collections, though salary delays occasionally create friction.

They’ve been running on Google Docs and manual processes. A full web app will launch by the end of November 2025. For a startup that’s financed ₦700 million, the operations are scrappy. But that’s also proof the model works without heavy tech infrastructure. The team—CEO Omolade Akinwumi on strategy, Abdulyekeen—managing finance, Chisom Okorie running operations—has been executing for over a year with minimal resources and zero defaults.

Winning TechCabal’s Battlefield in October 2025 changed things. The $10,000 prize is 2% of their total volume, but the visibility mattered. “When we won, our social media literally skyrocketed,” Abdulyekeen says. “We’ve had financiers reach out to us. We literally had to beg people before, and now people are willing to do much better than what we were doing.”

Investor conversations shifted from cold outreach to inbound. Financial partners who were lukewarm started engaging. They’re targeting ₦1 billion in disbursements by year-end—a 6x acceleration in two months. Ambitious, but it shows where momentum is headed post-Battlefield.

Moving forward with credit infrastructure

Ule Homes’ next move is distribution. It is pitching employers to offer rent and mortgage financing as staff benefits, cutting salary advance requests, improving retention, and scaling faster than individual marketing.

Like similar startups abroad, Ule Homes wants to embed where trust and documentation already exist. Landing banks or telcos would solve their biggest cost: customer acquisition.

But the real play is credit. Rent repayments prove reliability; mortgages turn that proof into lasting credit history. In a country where most people remain outside formal credit systems, that data is the real product. A year from now, the question won’t just be how many Nigerians Ule Homes helped pay rent; it’ll be how many entered the financial system because of it.