A Lagos landlord who owns nine properties told TheCable, plainly, that he checks a prospective tenant's tribe and profession before deciding. Not necessarily because he is prejudiced or objectively biased against certain tribes, but because he has been burned before by tenants who could manage the first payment and nothing after. According to him, He didn't build houses for charity.
Most Nigerian renters have met some version of that landlord, turned down for being single, for being a woman who intends to live alone, for coming from a specific ethnic group or for being a “businessman” instead of earning a salary, even when the businessman takes home more.
Solving these prejudice problems are generally challenging. For one, it’s a bit complicated to take a landlord to court for rejecting you based on gender or ethnicity; it’s generally hard to prove that, and even if you could, taking them to court may not even be worth it in the end.
So, knowing you were wronged may not necessarily get you ahead, something else has to.
Look again at what that landlord was actually doing. He wasn't assessing your character, he was guessing at your ability to pay, using the only signals available to him - ethnicity, occupation, marital status, etc. Bias in this market isn't purely prejudice. A good deal of it is what rushes in to fill an information vacuum. The landlord collects a year upfront, cannot verify a stranger, and knows that if it goes wrong, recovering his property will cost him months.
Which points at the actual fix – you need better evidence.
So, start building your rental reputation. Pay in a way that leaves a record. Hold on to your receipts. Ask each landlord to confirm in writing that you were a good tenant and you kept to your tenancy agreement, then carry that to the next one. A tenant who can show evidence of good behaviour from a previous landlord stands a better chance of overcoming the prejudice inhibitions than a tenant who can’t.
That is what we are building at Upward: Upward allows you to build a rental reputation based on your rent payment history and feedback from your landlord and property manager. This rental reputation can be fed to a prospecting landlord or property manager who can then make renting decisions based on your Upward score rather than on your ethnicity.
Stop proving yourself from scratch; start building your rent score with Upward today.