Nigeria’s real estate market, estimated to be worth more than $60 billion, presents enormous opportunities for investors, developers, and aspiring homeowners. Yet beneath that potential lies a persistent challenge: property fraud. Fragmented land registries across the country’s 36 states, limited public access to official records, and inconsistent verification processes have created an environment where fraudulent transactions can thrive.

For many buyers, especially individuals purchasing land for the first time, verifying ownership remains a difficult and risky process that often leads to costly disputes, prolonged legal battles, or significant financial losses.

It is against this backdrop that entrepreneur Emmanuel Kolawole, a founder with experience spanning fintech, healthtech, and real estate technology, launched LandSight, a property intelligence platform designed to bring greater transparency and trust to land transactions across Nigeria.

For Kolawole, the problem is deeply personal. Two years before founding LandSight, his family narrowly avoided becoming victims of a fraudulent land transaction. What appeared to be legitimate documentation and a credible seller turned out to be a sophisticated deception.

“What bothered me wasn’t just what happened to us,” Kolawole recalls. “It was realizing there was nothing in place to help us know sooner. No easy way to verify ownership. No reliable platform built specifically for this problem. Just risk.”

The experience exposed a critical gap in Nigeria’s property ecosystem and sparked the vision for a solution.

Officially launched in March 2026, LandSight enables individuals, legal professionals, property developers, and real estate practitioners to verify land ownership and property status before committing significant capital. The platform is designed to help users identify discrepancies, reduce transaction risks, and make more informed property decisions.

Unlike many consumer-facing proptech products, LandSight’s core challenge lies not in building the application itself but in creating the infrastructure that powers it. The company is actively pursuing integrations with government land administration systems, including Lagos State’s e-GIS platform and Ogun State’s OLARMS registry. These integrations aim to provide users with access to more reliable and verifiable land records.

“The hard part isn’t the app,” says Kolawole. “The hard part is the data. Getting accurate, reliable land records in Nigeria is a project in itself. But that’s exactly the work that needs to happen.”

The scale of the challenge is difficult to quantify. Property fraud is often underreported, and many land transactions occur through informal channels. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence, court records, and industry reports suggest that fraudulent land sales remain a widespread issue affecting thousands of Nigerians annually.

LandSight seeks to address this challenge by creating an additional layer of transparency. Rather than replacing legal counsel, surveyors, or government agencies, the platform serves as a verification tool that allows users to cross-reference available records and identify potential red flags before completing a transaction.

Kolawole’s cross-sector experience has shaped the company’s approach. His background in fintech emphasized secure transactions, data integrity, and trust-based systems, while his experience in healthtech provided insight into managing sensitive data within highly regulated environments.

Those lessons are now being applied to proptech, where the intersection of legal frameworks, government records, and significant financial commitments demands equally rigorous standards.

As LandSight expands its reach beyond its initial markets, with a nationwide rollout on its roadmap, the company represents a growing wave of African technology ventures building solutions tailored to local challenges.

For Kolawole, the mission extends beyond creating another real estate application. LandSight is being built as foundational digital infrastructure—one that could help establish greater trust, transparency, and efficiency in one of Nigeria’s most important economic sectors.

In a market where uncertainty has long been the norm, LandSight is betting that verified information can become the foundation upon which safer property transactions are built—one verified plot at a time.