Roomking CEO Modicai Mnculwane — Modicai Mnculwane

RoomKing aims to provide localised, affordable solutions to South Africa’s informal rental market.

RoomKing founder and CEO Modicai Mnculwane says the platform aims to empower landlords and tenants in South Africa’s informal rentals sector with a special focus on the burgeoning backroom rentals market in townships like Soweto.

“The backroom market is not serviced or run correctly in my thinking,” Mnculwane told TechCentral in an interview this week. “I’m coming in with that element of property background experience and applying it in the townships.”

Mnculwane has over a decade’s experience in the property sector, having worked in both development and management in high-density areas, including the Johannesburg and Durban CBDs as well as the Maboneng precinct, also in Johannesburg. RoomKing launched on 1 June and features a listing platform where landlords and tenants can find each other for free.

“The first phase of RoomKing is a listing platform that aims to cover Soweto, Tembisa and all other townships around Johannesburg by September. We have listed around 6 500 rooms in the two months since launch,” said Mnculwane, “and we already have people calling us from Gugulethu and Langa asking if they can list their rooms on the platform.”

RoomKing uses an advertising revenue model that allows users – landlords and tenants – to harness the platform for free. Additional features will attract charges as they are integrated into the application. These include the ability boost ads, the sale of legal document templates and a payment gateway aimed at helping reduce the informal market’s reliance on cash. Pricing for these features is yet to be finalised.

RoomKing ambitions

The entrepreneur’s ambitions for the next phase of the project are aimed at professionalising the service landlords provide to tenants and improving the legal aspects of the landlord-tenant relationship in the backroom market.

“The market is informal to the extent that people behave informally as well. For example, if you have got a room and I happen to want one, if I pay my R1 500 x3, you might not see me again for the next three months,” Mnculwane said. “Even if I am harbouring a criminal there, you wouldn’t know. You didn’t take an ID or anything.”

Mnculwane references the tavern shootings of 2022 and how some of the suspects, who were temporarily renting backyard rooms in Soweto, managed to keep their true identities a mystery to their landlords and neighbours. These types of problems could be avoided if the verification of identity becomes a norm in the informal market. Educating landlords and tenants, said Mnculwane, is something he is passionate about.

“Through RoomKing I am saying to landlords, ‘Let me give you the tools to professionalise your business,’” he explained. Some upcoming features on the RoomKing platform include an instant payment gateway, a digital lease that tenants “can sign on the spot” and templates for letters of demand “in case the tenant has not paid up so the landlord has legal assistance from the app”.

“We are driving the message that this is now a formal relationship and it needs to be managed in this way,” said Mnculwane.

Mnculwane believes that the key to success in this market lies in understanding the way people operate and developing solutions that integrate seamlessly into their behavioural patterns.

“In our research, we found there are people who assist with the viewing of the rooms in Soweto and they even charge for their service. We are not going to take business away from them, they can list their properties on RoomKing, and eventually they can be paid using the platform,” he said.

The entrepreneur’s ambitions go beyond South Africa’s borders, and RoomKing has already garnered interest from five countries on the continent, including Nigeria. “I didn’t expect that. I am now reading Africa’s free trade agreement to see how I fit there,” he said.

Read: Property, car websites also in commission’s cross hairs

His excitement at the prospect of building his latest venture into an intercontinental brand comes with caution: lessons learnt in the property space prior to launching RoomKing.

“After some success in Johannesburg we expanded to Durban. We paid some heavy school fees there,” he said. “Each area has its own way of doing things; no matter how much you think you know property, in each area there is a way that they operate that you must learn quickly.” — (c) 2023 NewsCentral Media