Lamudi issues release on expansion into Zimbabwe but says very little

A few days we broke the story that Africa Internet Holdings had entered Zimbabwe’s webspace with a properties website Lamudi. Today, the company issued a release announcing their expansion into Zimbabwe but said little about why the feel Zimbabwe is a lucrative expansion avenue.

In fact, from reading the brief release, you’d think they are expanding into Zimbabwe to keep the numbers running, after all, duplicating another Lamudi is not really that hard for them. In our initial article we noted:

A quick look at the Zim Lamudi will show you it was done in a hurry and that there’s no real physical operation on the ground. On the homepage for example there’s “We offer properties in Harare, Ndola, Kitwe and all around Zimbabwe.” Anyone with remote information about the cities in Zimbabwe would know Ndola and Kitwe don’t belong here. They belong next door in Zambia. A quick and clumsy copy and paste job of their Zambian copy of the site maybe. A Lamudi representative has since contacted us and said this was just an error. They have thanked us for picking it up.

However, at least from the release we now know that Lamudi has an MD for Zimbabwe called Mustafa Suleimanji, whose LinkedIn profile says he is Lamudi’s country manager for Tanzania (He is in fact country manager for Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe). Another website says he lives between Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania and Dubai, UAE. I guess pretty soon “Ndola in Zimbabwe” will become part of that list too.

Here’s the full release from Lamudi:

Following rapid expansion across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Lamudi, Africa’s leading online real estate platform is now expanding to Zimbabwe to bring its services to a new market.

Launched in October 2013, Lamudi is now operating across 25 countries in Africa, Asia and South America with further expansion planned in the future. The real estate platform recently announced reaching 250,000 property listings worldwide on the platform after launching just six months ago.

Mustafa Suleimanji, MD for Lamudi Zimbabwe commented on the recent expansion: “Lamudi has enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth in the past six months, from the initial launch to becoming Africa’s no. 1 online real estate platform. Our users have embraced the transparency of our service and the high quality of the listings, and we are very excited to bring these features to Zimbabwe as Lamudi continues to expand across the continent.”