There are several options for owning homes in Nigeria even in the midst of age-old housing shortages in Africa’s most populous nation.
Chudi Ubosi, principal partner at Ubosi Eleh & Co, said with shrinking consumer purchasing power, individuals seeking to own homes should adopt the step-by-step journey to realising their dreams.
“Join with someone and buy a property and watch the value as it rises. At a certain point, sell and move on to buy another. Continue this trajectory and after accumulating enough money from such a transaction, you can start building,” Ubosi, who was a guest at BusinessDay TV (BDTV), advised.
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He further advised that home seekers can subscribe to rent-to-own housing schemes which allow people to rent a home, pay the rent until they reach the value of the property and it becomes theirs, making them landlords through a tenancy period.
Ubosi lamented that Nigeria doesn’t have an effective mortgage system that enables people to secure housing loans, noting that, in other climes, mortgage loans run for 20-30 years at a single-digit interest rate, unlike Nigeria where the tenor is up to five years with a double-digit interest rate.
He advised the Nigerian government to encourage investment in housing by providing an enabling environment, giving private sector players an economy that works, deepening financial instruments, and making access to loans easy.
These measures have become necessary given the World Bank projection that, by 2025, 1.6 billion people are expected to be affected by the global housing shortage.
Over the last decade when the Nigerian economy took a turn for the worse, housing in Nigeria has been experiencing a crisis, with rising costs that have been worsening affordability issues.
Soaring inflation, which has had a significant impact on labour and material costs, and an expanding population and fast-paced urbanisation are factors exerting enormous pressure on housing in the country.
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The World Economic Forum, in 2022, observed that in most countries, the cost of housing has grown faster than incomes, citing data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
It added that, in a study of 200 cities globally, 90 percent were found to be unaffordable to live in, with the average home costing more than three times the average income.
“The United States alone is short of 1.5 million homes, according to a study by Moody’s Analytics. The country has less housing for sale or rent than at any time in the past 30 years, finds the study titled, ‘Overcoming the Nation’s Daunting Housing Supply Shortage,” the Forum said.
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