Building PropTech for East Africa: M-Pesa Rent Automation

#proptech #saas #fintech #africa

The Problem

In Kenya, over 90% of rent payments happen via M-Pesa (mobile money). But most landlords still reconcile these payments manually — downloading M-Pesa statements, matching transactions to tenants in Excel, and spending 8-12 hours/month on what should be automated.

I'm building HomeManager to solve this.

The Technical Stack

Backend: Django + Django REST Framework
Frontend: React (web) + React Native (mobile)
Payments: Safaricom M-Pesa Daraja API (STK Push + C2B)
Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront)
Task Queue: Celery + Redis
AI: Claude API + AWS Bedrock for natural language queries

M-Pesa Integration Architecture

The most interesting technical challenge: automatic payment reconciliation.

When a tenant pays rent via M-Pesa Paybill:

Safaricom sends a C2B callback to our API
We extract the account number from the transaction
Match it to a tenant's unit
Apply payment to their oldest unpaid invoice
Send SMS receipt instantly
Update the dashboard in real-time

The tricky part? Account numbers. Tenants type them inconsistently — "A12", "a12", "A 12", "Apt 12" should all match to the same unit. We built fuzzy matching logic that handles this.

Automated Invoice Generation

Every 1st of the month, a Celery beat task:

Queries all active leases
Generates invoices with rent + utilities (water, garbage)
Calculates water charges from meter readings
Applies any carried-forward balances
Sends SMS/email notifications to tenants

Late Fee Automation

The system:

Checks daily for invoices past grace period
Calculates fee (percentage, fixed, or both)
Adds as a line item on the invoice
Respects configurable caps (tenant protection)
Won't double-charge (idempotent)

This removes the landlord from the "bad guy" equation — it's the system enforcing what the lease says.

Lessons Building SaaS in East Africa

SMS > Email. Most tenant communication is SMS. Email open rates are <20% in this market.
Mobile-first everything. Property managers do meter readings on-site from phones.
Offline matters. Internet isn't always reliable. Cache critical data.
M-Pesa is not Stripe. Powerful API but inconsistent documentation.
Multi-currency from day one. We support KES, UGX, TZS, RWF.