Expert Listing
Verified property for sale, rent and lease across Nigeria, on the web and in the apps.
Visit expertlisting.ngExpert Listing is a Nigerian real estate platform built on one promise: every listing is verified, so the flat you see is the flat that exists, at the address and the price shown. I joined as senior frontend engineer in August 2026, and I work across the web platform, from property search to the community feed and messaging.
- ways in: buy, rent, lease, commercial and joint venture
- 5
- new surfaces I built: the community feed, messages and trending searches
- 3
- the web platform, alongside apps on the Play Store and App Store
- Web + apps
The problem
Looking for a home in Lagos usually means phone calls, forwarded WhatsApp flyers and inspection fees paid for listings that turn out to be gone, overpriced, or never real. The same flat is posted by five agents at five prices, and nobody can tell a developer from a middleman.
Expert Listing answers with verification: exact locations, real developers and verified agents. The frontend's job is to make that trust visible, and to make search fast on a phone, on a Nigerian network.
My role
I'm the senior frontend engineer on the web platform. I build from the product's designs at phone and desktop widths, agree API contracts with the backend team, and own the frontend architecture of what's below: how data is fetched and cached, how a screen behaves on a slow connection, and how it reads to someone using it for the first time.
What I built
Search and the map
Location, property type, rooms and price across buying, renting, leasing, commercial and joint-venture listings, with real pins on a map and a switch between the list and the map. One toggle keeps only listings with an exact location, for people who want to know precisely where they'd live.
The community feed
A place for everyone on the platform to post: a property that's available, a request for one, a question or a poll, with photos, video, documents and the place it's about. Stories run along the top, and trending searches sit beside the posts.
One rule shaped the whole design. A post can only carry an official listing card if it's linked to an approved listing, so the feed can be open to everyone without undercutting the verification the platform stands on.
Messages
Direct conversations with agents, developers and other members, with read receipts, unread counts, archive, block, and search across every account. Unread messages can be emailed after a delay the member chooses, and the link in that email opens the exact conversation.
Trending searches
Where buyers and renters are looking right now, by day, week or month, with the change against the last period and the places on a map. It turns search data the platform already has into something a renter can use to choose an area, and an agent can use to decide where to list.
Listings and accounts
A listing's price history, card titles written from the record itself, moving a listing onto the feed, a sign-up that verifies a phone number and picks up where it stopped, and one header across the whole app.
How it's built
Next.js App Router and TypeScript. TanStack Query holds server state, so every screen reads from one cache instead of asking the API again; Ably carries messages in real time; Google Maps draws the pins.
Where the API is still catching up with a design, the screen is built against typed fixtures first and switched over when the endpoint lands, so the interface never waits on the backend. Answers from the live API are captured as fixtures and tested against, so a change in their shape fails a test, not a customer.
In use: a move to Lekki
Adaeze has a new job in Lekki and three weeks to move. She searches Lekki Phase 1 for a two-bedroom under ₦10m a year and turns on exact locations only. A handful of verified listings are left, and none is quite right, so she posts a request on the feed.
An agent who covers the area replies within the hour with a terrace in Ikate. She checks Ikate on trending searches and sees it's climbing, messages him about the service charge, and books an inspection for Saturday at eleven. She never pays an inspection fee for a flat that doesn't exist.
A worked example of how the pieces fit together; Adaeze is illustrative.
Where it stands
Search, listings and accounts are live on expertlisting.ng. The feed, messages and trending searches are built and waiting on release. The screens on this page come from a production build of that work, run with sample posts, conversations and search counts, so no real member's data is shown.