Nigeria does not have a small housing problem. It has one of the largest housing gaps in the world, and it grows a little wider every year the country builds fewer homes than it needs. For a buyer or investor, that gap is not just a policy headline. It is the reason prices keep climbing,…
Buyers fall in love with the apartment. They study the finish, the view and the price. Almost nobody interrogates the one number they will pay every single year for as long as they own the place: the service charge. That is a costly blind spot. A service charge can quietly run into hundreds of thousands,…
Ask most people what stands between them and an MREIF mortgage, and they will say a number. They imagine a single credit score, a secret pass mark, and they worry theirs is not high enough. The reality is more useful and less frightening. There is no published MREIF credit score you have to hit. A…
The older house looks like the smart buy. It is cheaper, it sits in an established neighbourhood, and you can walk through the actual building instead of trusting a drawing. The new house costs more and sometimes exists only on paper. Then the surveys come back. The old house needs rewiring, new plumbing, a new…
A man keeps a folder of receipts. It contains every payment for his land, signed and stamped, going back years. He believes that folder makes the property his. Then one day another family arrives with a registered title to the same land, and a court agrees with them. This happens in Lagos more often than…
Most buyers watch the wrong number. They track the asking price of the property they want and assume the market moves on its own. It does not. Behind almost every shift in what a home costs in Lagos sits a government decision, made in Abuja or Alausa, that the buyer never sees. Interest rates, land…
There is a belief in Nigeria that building your own house is always cheaper than buying a finished one. It feels obviously true. You cut out the developer’s profit, so you must save money. Millions of Nigerians have started building on exactly that logic. A great many of them are still building years later, or…
The damage does not announce itself. A hairline crack appears on a balcony beam. A rust stain bleeds through fresh paint near a window. A chunk of concrete falls from a soffit, and everyone assumes it was a bad batch. In coastal Lagos, it usually is not. It is the air. Lekki, Victoria Island and…
It is the question almost every serious buyer in Lagos asks eventually. Do I buy the cheaper unit that is still on paper, or the finished one I can walk through today? One promises a lower price and a payment plan. The other promises certainty. Both can be the right answer, and both have ruined…
A woman in Houston sent ₦95 million to a seller in Ajah last year. She had a signed Deed of Assignment, a survey plan, and photographs of the fence. What she did not have was one piece of paper from the Office of the Surveyor-General telling her the land sat inside a committed government acquisition.…
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