What Vallo is, and who it is for

Vallo is Nigeria's all-in-one property marketplace, for finding a place and getting into it. Shortlets, hotels, apartments, homes, villas, restaurants, experiences, annual rentals, shops, offices and land sit in one catalogue, and the same account carries your bookings, your money, your messages and your conversations about the areas you live in.

It is built for how renting and staying actually works here. That means three questions come before the price: is there light, is there water, and will the gate let you in. Those are structured facts on a listing, not a tick box called Backup Power, and you can filter on them.

• Find somewhere. Search by city or area, filter by budget, rooms, guests, amenities, power and water, then look at the results as a list or on a map.
• Book and pay. Hold your dates, see the whole price in naira before you commit, and pay by card or from your wallet.
• Keep your money in one place. Fund a wallet, withdraw to a Nigerian bank account, send money to another Vallo account, and read every movement in a statement that cannot be edited.
• Talk to the agent. Ask about the road, the generator or the landlord before you commit anything, inside the platform where the conversation is on record.
• Ask the assistant. Ask for what you want in English, Yorùbá, Hausa or Igbo and get real listings back, never invented ones.
• Join your place. Around is a layer of places rather than strangers: your local government, your estate, your campus, and what people there are saying today.
• List a property. Apply as an agent, get verified, publish, manage a calendar and get paid.

Guests, tenants and buyers. Someone looking for two nights in Lekki, a year in Yaba, a shop front in Onitsha or a plot of land in Epe. Each market works the way that market works, and the product says so: an annual tenancy is message the agent, inspect the property, then pay, and there is no Reserve button on a rental, by design.

Agents. Independent agents, estate managers and property owners who want their stock in front of people without paying to be there. One word for all of them, whether what they list is a room for a weekend, a flat for a year, a shop, an office or a plot of land.

People who live somewhere. You do not have to be booking anything to use Around. It is worth opening on a Tuesday to find out whether the light is on in your area.

Vallo takes no fee. Not to look, not to book, not to list, not to be paid. There is no service fee, no booking fee, no listing fee and no commission taken out of what anybody pays an agent, in any market on this platform.

What a total is made of depends on the market, and in every one of them it is the agent’s number and nothing of ours on top of it. On a shortlet or a hotel room it is the nights multiplied by the rate, plus a cleaning charge where the agent sets one. On a yearly tenancy it is the move-in total, which is the rent and every other sum payable before you get the keys, printed as one figure. On a sale, on land, and on a shop or an office, the price on the listing is the asking price, and what is finally paid is agreed between you and the agent. Vallo adds nothing to any of them and takes a share of none of them.

This is not a promotion with an end date. It is how the ledger is built: every settled charge is split into the agent share, the payment processor charge and the platform share, and the platform share is zero. If a card processor charges for moving money, that is named as the processor charge, because it is theirs.

So if anybody presents an agency fee, an inspection fee, a holding fee or a caution fee as a Vallo charge, they are lying to you. Read Trust and safety and report them.

Three surfaces, one account.

• The platform. Home, Search, Around, Saved, Bookings, Wallet, Inbox, Notifications, your profile and Settings.
• Agent Mode. A separate workspace at /agent for listings, the calendar, bookings, earnings, reviews and verification. You switch into it once your application is approved.
• The public site. The pages you are reading now, plus the help centre, safety, standards and cancellations.

The product works in English, Yorùbá, Hausa and Igbo, and the switcher is in the header on every public page and in Settings inside the platform. Dark is the default theme and stays dark unless you choose otherwise in Settings, whatever your phone is set to.