From selling cooking gas to N1bn in shortlet bookings: How two sisters built a 1,000-apartment business

Before Bisola Animashaun was managing one of the largest shortlet portfolios in Nigeria, she was delivering cooking gas.

She started Gasurgently at 21. The idea was simple enough, cooking gas delivered to your doorstep in Abuja, but the business punished her. Logistics costs kept eating the margins, and after three years of fighting for every single delivery, she took a decision most entrepreneurs never talk about publicly. She shut it down.

“People think the story starts when things work. Mine started when they didn’t,” she says. “Gasurgently taught me operations, customer service, how to survive when nothing is going your way. I didn’t know it at the time but I was in training.”

Today, Bisola and her sister Bukola Animashaun run Luxury Shortlets Abuja, a property management and booking agency with more than 1,000 shortlet apartments across Abuja and Lagos. The company has hosted over 10,000 guests and facilitated more than ₦1 billion in bookings, most of them starting from an Instagram DM or a visit to its website, luxuryshortlets.com. It marked its fifth anniversary this July. In five years, the sisters have not taken a single kobo of outside investment.

The structure of the business is unusual. Bukola, who registered the company, runs the Lagos operation. Bisola, based in Abuja, handles marketing, brand and platform operations. They are fifty-fifty shareholders, and they say that arrangement is the reason the company moves quickly.

“There’s no boardroom politics when it’s your sister. We disagree, we settle it, we move,” Bisola says. “Decisions that take other companies a month take us a phone call.”

In an industry where trust is scarce, the family setup has turned out to be more than a nice detail. Guests worry about fake listings. Property owners worry about damage and unpaid money. A business run by two sisters with a five-year track record has become Luxury Shortlets’ strongest selling point.

The shortlet boom nobody planned

Nigeria’s shortlet industry grew in the gap between hotels and yearly rentals. Young professionals, diaspora visitors and business travellers wanted furnished apartments with privacy and flexibility. Landlords, for their part, discovered a well-run shortlet could earn far more than a traditional lease.

What emerged was fragmented and informal. Anyone with an apartment and an Instagram page could call themselves an agency, and the fraud stories multiplied.

Luxury Shortlets bet that professionalism would win. The company verifies every property in its portfolio, vets guests, and has built its Instagram-to-WhatsApp booking pipeline into a machine that now handles thousands of enquiries every month across two cities, alongside listings on luxuryshortlets.com.

Both cities stay busy all year round. But from October, the so-called Ember months, Lagos enters a different gear entirely, and by the December festive season demand can multiply as much as tenfold. A standard two-bedroom that goes for around N150,000 a night, or N250,000 and above at the luxury end, can climb to N750,000 and even N1 million a night in prime areas like Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Lekki Phase 1. Prime apartments get booked as much as two months in advance, and in December many owners insist on stays of two weeks to a full month.

“December Lagos is its own economy,” Bisola Animashaun says. “If you’re calling us in November for a December apartment, you’re already late.”

“We treat a N50,000-a-night booking with the same seriousness a hotel treats a corporate account,” Bukola says. “That’s the whole secret. It’s not glamorous. It’s consistency.”

What N1 billion in bookings actually means

Bisola is careful with the numbers. The N1 billion figure is gross booking value facilitated across the portfolio, not company revenue. Luxury Shortlets earns management and booking fees on that volume.

“I’d rather under-claim and over-deliver,” she says. “Property owners hand us the keys to assets worth hundreds of millions. The least we owe them is honesty about our own numbers.”

Ask her about Gasurgently and she doesn’t dodge it either. “Every founder you admire has a Gasurgently. Most just hide it. I think mine is the reason Luxury Shortlets exists.”

The research trips that looked like holidays
For the past few years, while their peers put profits into cars and land, the sisters have been spending theirs on plane tickets. And taking notes.

Together they have travelled through Kenya, Egypt and Thailand. On her own, Bisola has studied South Africa, Seychelles, Qatar and China. Bukola took Ghana and Dubai, paying particular attention to how the Gulf city turned hospitality into an industrial machine. From outside it looked like two sisters enjoying their money. Internally, it was fieldwork.

“Thailand changed how I think,” Bisola says. “A developing country that turned hospitality into a national industry. The systems, the standards, how they make a tourist feel. Seychelles showed me what African luxury tourism looks like when it’s done deliberately. Every trip we were asking the same question. Why does the world holiday there and not here?”

Their answer is Stay Afrik, the sisters’ next venture, a travel company packaging African experiences for Western tourists, from the December energy of Lagos, Nigeria to the coastlines of East Africa.

“Nigerians have mastered hosting each other,” she says. “The next step is hosting the world. Everything we’ve learned managing a thousand apartments, plus everything we’ve studied across three continents. That’s where Stay Afrik is heading.”

For now the focus remains what they have already built. Two cities, over a thousand doors, and a five-year-old promise that a booking with Luxury Shortlets means exactly what it says. (BusinessDay)