Anybody who has had an experience with finding a home to rent in Ghana and the rest of Africa knows exactly how difficult, long, and tedious the process can be.

It involves months of manually searching for homes, and sometimes paying exorbitant fees to agents, leaving prospective renters and homeowners with really unsavory experiences in the entire process.

This is a challenge that young Ghanaian entrepreneur based in the USA, Ebenezer Mensah, has decided to solve through Photizo - a company building a home sharing platform to allow homeowners to rent their homes directly to tenants.

As cofounder, Ebenerzer Mensah recounts the idea of staying in a stranger’s home is not new to the continent and predates platforms like Airbnb.

He grew up in Ghana and recalls fond memories of his family staying in rented homes with the homeowners for years. “It was like an Airbnb, but for longer stays, and before there was Airbnb,” he says with a smile on his face.

He left to attend Pomona College in the United States, and interned as a Software Engineer at Amazon.

It was during this time that a couple of friends in Ghana, cofounder, Philemon and Patrick, reached out to him to share their frustrations with how difficult it was to find a home to rent.

Determined to solve this, he began working on it with his friend, Dominic, a Harvard MBA candidate also from Ghana and Philemon, trying to understand the pain points and the market.

He was shocked at first to find out just how sparse the solution space for the problem was.

About 900 million Africans will rent a home over the next 3 decades, and the fact that there was no better solution to help these people find homes they love easily was mind boggling.

“We can request rides to take us to and from work on demand, and we can find videos to watch on demand, and we can still not find homes to rent on demand,” he quizzically asked.

His solution to the problem is RentIt, a mobile app that allows homeowners to rent out their homes to tenants.

Renters can download the app and search any geographic region they are interested in renting a home from. They will be presented with a list of homes.

They can proceed to click on any home and be presented with a detailed description of the home, including amenities available in the home.

If they are interested in the home, they can pay to rent the home directly through the app, at their own convenience.

The app has seen incredible usage and adoption since it launched, helping several hundred homeowners rent their homes to tenants, and this has courted the interest of some incredible investors in Silicon Valley, including Ali Partovi, an early investor in Facebook, Airbnb, and several iconic tech companies of the world .

Despite the early success, Ebenezer maintains this is just the beginning, “We are in the very early innings of what would be a radical transformation of how people find, rent homes, and live in Africa.

We want to be at the forefront of it, leading with cutting edge technology that makes it easier for people to find homes that are affordable and love,” he told Joy Business.