How Forex, Weak Mortgage, Housing Deficit And Other Issues Shape The Nigerian Real Estate – Dr Adeyemi
By THECONSCIENCEng
Dr Michael Adeyemi is the founder and CEO of Realtor Max Property based in Lagos, Nigeria.
His young and vibrant company sets out to disrupt the real estate industry with brilliant and affordable plans for seamless property ownership and sustainable real estate wealth creation for Nigerians.
The firm currently promotes a 500 hectares property called Urban Max Estate around the Sagamu Bypass on the Lagos Ibadan Express where Nigerians are afforded opportunities to own property by paying in instalments with as little as #1,250 naira daily amongst other offers.
Speaking on how the fluctuation of forex especially US dollars affected real estate market in Nigeria, he said, “Yes, it affects the industry a lot, for example, the iron rods are imported, tiles, all building materials are imported in which the means of transactions are in Dollars.
“Now giving price to a client, all the cost prices of materials will be factored into this. For example, some houses, five years ago were built with seven million naira, building same structure presently cost like sixteen million. Imagine a realtor asked buyers to come buy an apartment at the rate of seven million per unit, in just two years, the price spikes to nine million naira, and in the third year it increases to fourteen million naira in which the initial agreement was seven million naira. Then this happens due to the high rate in dollar which affect the prices of building material in the market.”
What innovation will Realmax be known for in the industry?
We are trying to play within the two market. The first market with luxuries and also the second market with average citizens. We are trying to integrate the two together.”
Low cost housing today?
Low cost is relative. What we refer to as low cost in real estate before is getting access to houses of 2.5million, there was a time that Alade started real estate in Nigeria they were building houses as low as 2.5M to own a bungalow that is known as low cost (cheaper houses) but today, we cannot have such and why I said it is relative is that your income equals the availability so if you earn a hundred thousand naira, if you say something is low cost, its what you can afford within a short period of time that is , it should be around one or two million and maximum is three million but today can we build house with three million naira the answer is no, can we build with 5 million the answer is no at least for a 2 bedroom house we would be looking at 10million naira so we cant call all this low cost and the government have remove subsidy from petrol maybe they can add subsidy to real estate. Then government has to come in because they are the only one that can do it. But unfortunately, the ones government are building are very expensive and not everyone can afford it.
Why mortgage bank are not functional?
A lot of them are there, yes they are working but fir the people at the upper end of the property business in which they are funding them but for the low cost nobody is looking at it unless you have a capital intensive project.
Plans for next five years
We are looking at the company that will greatly solve housing problem for all Nigerians and that will call people to smartly and wisely invest into real estate sector
Realtor Max projects
Currently, the ones we are working are two, one we have Aje estate and the urban max. aside that, we have other project we haven’t touch and they are very large project.