This one was not marketing, at least not at first. In 2023 I developed a four-bedroom duplex terrace at River Park Estate in Lugbe, Abuja, and I did nearly every job on it. I studied urban and regional planning, so the site made sense to me, but studying cities and building a piece of one are not the same thing. I was the project manager and the site engineer, giving the instructions and making the calls, and when the building was finished I became the marketer too, because a house that does not sell is not finished.
I assumed that last part would be easy. Abuja is the capital, its property market has a reputation, and I told myself a good house in Abuja more or less sells itself, quickly, and at a premium. That assumption was the expensive part. Selling turned out to be far more tedious than I expected, my first real schooling in negotiation and in actually talking to buyers, and underneath the effort was a simpler mistake. I had priced and pitched the house against a story that did not apply to it.
The story I borrowed was "Abuja." The reality was Lugbe. The buyers who pay the big-class premium in Abuja are not looking in Lugbe. They are looking in Katampe, Maitama, Asokoro. I had taken the reputation of the whole city and assumed it belonged to my particular location, and it did not. The house was good and the city was hot, but neither of those was the buyer standing in front of me, and the buyer is the only thing that sets the price.
We sold it in the end, and I count it a success. A four-bedroom duplex, developed and sold, at around 130 million naira. But it went slower and landed closer to earth than the fantasy I started with, and the entire gap between the two was made of one wrong assumption.
What it taught me is the thing I keep relearning in every industry I touch. The reputation of the category is not your position. Positioning is always local. "Abuja" does not buy a house any more than "crypto" adopts a protocol. A specific person, in a specific place, weighing specific alternatives, does. The work is to understand that person, not to borrow the glow of the category they happen to sit inside. I learned it standing on a finished terrace in Lugbe, waiting for a buyer who, it turned out, was shopping somewhere else.