Can Technology Fix Trust? PropTech, Digital Land Registries, and the Future of Property Transactions in Nigeria

In Nigeria, a buyer can transfer fifty million naira for a car before leaving the dealership and trust the transfer completely. The banking system verifies it almost instantly with a clean auditable trail. Transferring the title to a plot of land worth the same amount is a different story as it can take months, sometimes years; and even then, ownership still isn’t always legitimate. Nigeria’s housing deficit gets most of the public’s attention but underneath it sits a quieter, more destructive one: even where housing exists, the transactions that transfer ownership are rarely as trustworthy as the banking system buyers use to pay for it. This essay argues that technology cannot manufacture that missing trust but it can make its absence visible, priced, and much harder to hide behind.

Defining the Trust Problem

Property transactions in Nigeria are complex affairs comprising multiple stages. As such, trust is not something that can be explained simply. At different stages of the transaction spectrum, there are different conditions at play, and this manifests as a taxonomy of the trust problem explained under three different layers:

Title Trust: A prospective investor looking to buy land needs a way to verify that the seller is, in fact, the legal owner or has legal authority to sell. Lagos state alone is estimated to have ~₦3 trillion of informal land, and this represents a huge risk to prospective buyers as verification is slow and expensive.

Process Trust: This has proven to be the most precarious layer. Once deals are completed, will the transactions be completed as documented? Cases of land grabbing, double allocation, and even escrow or transaction fraud are rampant, limiting the completion of property transactions and hurting the country’s economy.

Institutional Trust: If the deal moves on and is eventually registered and approved by the government, will it stay that way, true and enforceable? There have been cases of corruption, data loss, and a general lack of proper data standardization which leads to rightful land owners losing governmental enforceability through no fault of theirs.

Differentiating these three layers matter greatly if any real progress is to be made on improving trust in property transactions.

Underlying all three layers of trust is a more basic condition: Nigeria’s property market is structurally opaque, and each trust failure compounds it. The 2024 JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index placed Nigeria in its “Low Transparency” tier, evidencing how little of the market’s data exists in a usable, comparable, interoperable form. This opacity isn’t confined to title records where the incentives to obscure information are highest but shows up even at the shallow end of the market. A personal project to aggregate basic, publicly listed property data across a handful of Nigerian platforms met resistance at the infrastructure level within days through aggressive rate-limiting. If public listings data resists aggregation this easily, title verification, where the stakes and the incentives to obscure are both far higher, was never going to be simple.

What Technology Can and Cannot Do

Technology makes fraud detectable. Computers are infinitely more efficient than humans. If correctly implemented, technology can flag duplicate titles and prevent boundary disputes. This is proven as Lagos’ e-GIS has been reported to reduce Certificate of Occupancy turnaround by around 60%. This demonstrates a huge upside, though fraud is still not eliminated completely. A bad actor within the system could still engage in fraudulent activities, but the technology, if properly designed, would make that detectable upon audit.

It also reduces the cost of verification. A title verification that would’ve taken weeks and side payments to sidestep bureaucracy would now take minutes, making it both easier and cheaper to verify. This has a second-order effect as the improved ease makes more people willing to verify and standardize their titles, which in turn increases data calibration and coverage.

Finally, it creates an auditable data trail that makes new private sector products possible. Once fraudulent patterns are objectively visible, insurers can price the risk. Title insurance, for example, indemnifies a buyer or lender if a defect in ownership surfaces after a sale closes; a product that depends entirely on data good enough to underwrite against. This is where technology’s real leverage sits; not in replacing institutions, but in making room for markets to do work that institutions cannot.

Technology can also address process trust directly. A digital escrow system that releases funds only when independently verifiable conditions are met, such as a clean title search or a confirmed survey, removes the need to place trust in a middleman. This effectively closes the gap where deals collapse between agreement and completion.

However, technology cannot fix a terribly-governed system. Bad processes are still bad processes, and technology is a massive multiplier. Digitizing these terrible processes will only lead to catastrophe as they can now be executed at scale, leading to much worse problems than lack of trust.

It also cannot resolve the legal impasse between customary and statutory land tenure. This is a legal problem that has plagued the country since the Land Use Act was enacted in 1978. The adoption of technology will not magically make the pending legal claims and disputes disappear.

Lastly, technology cannot force integration by institutions. The best piece of technology is only as good as its real world implementation. A super-fast digital title search is only as good as the registry behind it. This is the opacity problem again, this time at the institutional level: Lagos’s e-GIS has been live since 2022, yet the value of informal land remains high, largely because standardization hasn’t kept pace with the technology built on top of it.

The role of technology is not to replace human judgment, but to make it faster to execute and harder to corrupt or defraud. Estonia’s blockchain-verification land registry follows the same principle where judges still decide and the technology only makes their record tamper-evident. Nigeria has already seen this pattern succeed elsewhere. When the 2022 currency redesign triggered a nationwide cash scarcity, fintech platforms did not win the trust of market women and small traders by promising seamless transfers. NIBSS, the public settlement system, remained slow and unreliable. OPay in particular won that trust through speed, reliability, and explicit warnings the moment the settlement layer was lagging or down. Users didn’t need the system to be perfect; they needed to know, immediately, when it wasn’t. PropTech’s task is similar: not a title system that never fails, but one that tells a buyer, honestly and timely, where the risk sits.

 A Forward Implementation Path

A credible path forward requires a phased plan. In the short term, there is a need for the incorporation of a scheme that promotes interoperability of the data collected in registries across the country. This curbs data fragmentation while ensuring that the technology is always consistent and compounds well with the passage of time.

In the medium term, even with data aggregation in place, no registry will be fully reliable overnight. This is where private entities can move faster than government by pairing already-digitized registries with independent title verification and title insurance. Because insurers, not the government, underwrite these products, they only need enough data to price the risk honestly and not a ‘perfect’ registry. This is the essay’s argument in practice: technology doesn’t close the trust gap directly, it makes the gap small and visible enough for a market to close around it.

Over the long term, the friction between customary and statutory land tenure systems needs to be resolved in order for the legal foundation to be properly established. No application can substitute for a weak legal foundation and if the technological implementation is to be lasting and sustainable, a more equitable resolution is to be reached regarding the state of the tenurial system.

Conclusion

Technology cannot manufacture trust in Nigeria’s property market. What OPay proved during the 2022 cash scarcity, and what Lagos’s e-GIS and Estonia’s court-anchored registry demonstrate in their own ways, is more realistic and useful: the absence of trust can be made visible, priced, and harder to hide behind. That shift does not resolve the standoff between customary and statutory tenure, or force a reluctant registry to integrate with its neighbours. Those remain institutional and legal battles, fought slowly, by people, not by code. But visibility changes incentives because a duplicate title that surfaces on audit is a risk a bad actor must now weigh and not one they can assume will pass unnoticed. The buyer who paid for a car in an instant and the buyer who waits months to know if a plot of land is truly theirs, are separated by nothing that technology alone can fix. What can close that gap is the same thing that got market traders to trust their phones over hard currency: not a perfect system, but one that admits, immediately, when something has gone wrong.

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This essay was originally written as my entry for the Fourth Edition of the Diya Fatimilehin & Co. annual national essay competition