Nigeria has a staggering housing deficit; anywhere between 17 and 20 million homes are required to plug the gap between the number of habitable housing units available and what’s being demanded by the country’s population.
Ola Adetola Emmanuel-King says he was aiming to solve this problem when he set up Adron Homes, a real estate company, in 2012. He thinks he’s gotten a handle of the key contributors to the deficit and describes Adron as an exercise in tackling those issues.
Emmanuel-King, like many other keen watchers of the Nigerian real estate sector, points out that there’s no scarcity of property designed for the upper class (that part of the market is probably experiencing a glut). It’s the supply of affordable living spaces for middle and lower-class citizens that isn’t being attended to by a lot of businesses in the sector. Industry players claim that this end of the consumer spectrum isn’t profitable enough.
Adron Homes presents as a real estate company that shifts the blame for the shortage of housing away from the demand side. Their approach isn’t to stick with demanding one-off payments for high-end mansions. They’re reaching out to the wider market, and trying to make customers out of less well-off families.
Perhaps the main weapon in their arsenal is the daily payments for property, which they say works better than two or three-time fee settlements for most Nigerians. A lot of people either earn too little to cover the cost of housing at one go or have income streams that run rather irregularly. These categories of persons will require payment plans that are more suited to their financial realities- which is precisely what Adron offers with its spread-out investment plans.
The company is currently developing property in Ikeja, Badagry, Otta, Ibadan, and Abuja, to name a few locations. A number of spaces in these estates- including duplexes, terraced bungalows, and three bedroom apartments -can be paid for over a period of up to 10 years. Spread out payments could mean that you just need to invest as little as ₦2,000 per day in some of these properties to land them for yourself.
Adron puts the number of clients it’s served till date at well over 100,000 persons. That’s only a fraction of the 1.8 million it wants to help with its houses in its first ten years. But Emmanuel-King insists that they can shave at least 10% off Nigeria’s housing deficit by 2022 if they keep pushing their client-friendly payment plans and packages to the public.
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