Galvanizing real estate business in Nigeria – Dr. Muiz Banire
Barely over a week ago, precisely on the 16th of December, 2025, the Lagos State Government convened its 6th Lagos real estate market place conference and exhibitions with the theme, “Shaping the future of Lagos Megacity, Infrastructure Investment, Innovation and Affordable Housing”. I had the privilege of delivering the keynote address at the summit and interrogated the topic ‘The Architecture of Progress: Building an enduring Legacy Through Infrastructure and sustainable Real Estate in Lagos’. In this discourse, I am taking the conversation beyond the State of Lagos into addressing the challenge of housing nationally.
To this extent, I shall capture seven crucial pillars of a potential successful journey on housing. Improving real estate business in Nigeria starts with accepting a blunt truth: our market is not short of demand; it is short of trust, clarity, infrastructure support, and affordable long-term capital. Nigerians need homes, offices, retail spaces, warehouses, and serviced land at scale. What frustrates supply is a cluster of predictable bottlenecks, land administration delays, documentation uncertainty, multiple taxation, poor planning enforcement, weak consumer protection, and a financing ecosystem that makes long-tenor housing development feel like pushing a boulder uphill.
A practical paper on improving the business must therefore focus on reforms that reduce transaction risk, lower the cost of doing business, and widen access to credible finance, while professionalizing the entire value chain. The first pillar is land governance and title certainty. Real estate thrives where ownership is clear and transfers are swift. In Nigeria, the process of obtaining consent, perfecting title, registering interests, and validating survey plans is still too slow, too discretionary, and too fragmented across offices and levels of government. Improvement begins with digitization that actually works: end-to-end electronic processes for searches, payments, submissions, tracking, and issuance, backed by service-level timelines and public dashboards.
When investors can predict how long a transaction will take, they can price risk properly; when they cannot, they either inflate prices or walk away. A second necessary step is harmonization: reduce duplicative documentation requirements between land registries, surveyor-general’s office and planning authorities; create integrated databases so that a parcel’s status, ownership, encumbrances, planning approvals, and tax history, can be verified in one place. It is crucial that registered titles be made indefeasible. Third, government must reduce opportunities for discretion by standardizing fees and publishing them plainly.
Where fees are opaque, corruption becomes a “hidden tax” that ultimately lands on the buyer or tenant. The second pillar is planning integrity and infrastructure coordination. Real estate business is not simply about buildings; it is about functioning neighborhoods. In many cities, development occurs ahead of roads, drainage, water, and power, creating “luxury in a swamp”, high-priced estates trapped in daily flooding, gridlock, or energy insecurity. The solution is disciplined, enforceable physical planning tied to infrastructure phasing. State governments should adopt clear local area plans that define densities, setbacks, right-of-way protection, parking standards, flood controls, and environmental buffers, and then enforce them consistently, without selective indulgence for the influential.
At the same time, infrastructure financing should be coordinated with private development through transparent instruments: impact fees tied to verifiable infrastructure delivery, development charges that are ring-fenced for specific projects, and public-private partnerships for roads, drainage, and street lighting where returns are measurable. When infrastructure is predictable, property values rise sustainably, vacancy rates fall, and the market becomes bankable. The third pillar is housing finance reform and access to long-term capital. Most real estate development needs patient money; Nigeria’s financial system is dominated by short-term deposits and expensive credit. Developers therefore build in small phases, price in inflation, and pass financing costs to buyers. To improve the business, government and regulators should strengthen and deepen the mortgage ecosystem.
This includes expanding the availability of long-tenor funds for primary mortgage lenders, reducing the cost of funds through credible refinancing windows, improving underwriting standards, and increasing consumer confidence in mortgages. Equally important is supporting construction finance and developer finance: structured credit lines tied to project milestones, escrow and trustee arrangements that protect buyers’ deposits, and standardized project monitoring that reduces bank risk. Where inflation and exchange-rate volatility are high, developers also need products for risk management, like realistic price-indexed payment plans and legal clarity on off-plan contracts. The aim should be simple: reduce reliance on “cash-and-carry” housing, which excludes the middle class and shrinks market depth.
The fourth pillar is regulatory clarity and fair taxation. Nigeria’s real estate sector suffers from multiple levies, some legitimate, some opportunistic. Improvement requires a coordinated “ease of doing real estate” agenda: streamline taxes and charges across state and local levels, eliminate duplications, and ensure that property-related taxes are predictable, transparent, and digital. A buyer should not have to pay four different agencies for essentially the same transaction verification. At the same time, government should differentiate between productive taxes and punitive ones.
Well-designed property tax can fund local services and improve neighborhoods, but arbitrary charges discourage formalization and push transactions underground. If governments want a wider tax base, they must make compliance cheaper than avoidance just like the current effort being made. The fifth pillar is consumer protection and market credibility, especially in off-plan sales. One of the greatest killers of confidence is the phenomenon of failed projects, dubious developers, “one land sold to five people,” and endless disputes. Improving the business requires enforceable rules that protect buyers and reward honest operators.
States should establish clear licensing regimes for developers, estate agents, and property managers, with minimum standards and sanctions for malpractice. Off-plan transactions should be strengthened by mandatory escrow arrangements, periodic disclosures, and independent project audits for developments above a certain threshold. Where disputes arise, specialized real estate dispute resolution mechanisms, fast-track tribunals or dedicated court divisions, can reduce the time and cost of enforcement.
When buyers know the system will protect them swiftly, they participate more confidently, and that confidence becomes liquidity for the entire market. The sixth pillar is professionalism and capacity across the value chain. Real estate is a system of skills: surveying, architecture, engineering, quantity surveying, project management, facility management, valuation, brokerage, law, finance, and construction trades. Nigeria has talent, but the market still suffers from poor data, weak ethics, inconsistent standards, and limited technical capacity in modern methods. Improvement requires strong professional education, continuing development, and market standards: standardized leases, clear agency agreements, transparent commission structures, standardized valuation methodologies, and professional indemnity expectations. Additionally, developers must adopt modern construction and project delivery methods, value engineering, modular components where feasible, stronger quality control, and life-cycle costing. A building that looks good on commissioning day but becomes unmanageable within two years damages investor returns and the reputation of the market.
The seventh pillar is data, transparency, and proptech adoption. Real estate business improves when information is accessible: verified listings, market rents, transaction prices, vacancy data, neighborhood infrastructure plans, and title verification. Today, many decisions are made by rumor and guesswork. Government agencies, professional bodies, and private platforms should collaborate on credible data standards. Digitized land registries should enable easier searches, samples of which obtains in some States and the Federal Capital Territory; planning authorities should publish development control requirements; and the private market should build platforms where listings are verified and transaction histories are recorded. Proptech can also reduce friction in property management, rent collection, maintenance tracking, tenant screening, and energy management, improving yields and reducing disputes. Transparency does not only help consumers; it helps investors price assets properly, which brings more institutional capital into the sector. The eighth pillar is building materials, local production, and cost management.
Construction cost volatility is a major constraint in Nigeria, driven by exchange-rate pressures, import dependence, logistics costs, and insecurity on supply routes. Government can improve real estate business by supporting local manufacturing of key materials, standardizing building components, and improving logistics infrastructure.
Developers, for their part, should adopt procurement strategies that reduce exposure, framework agreements, local sourcing where quality allows, and design choices that balance aspiration with maintainability. Ultimately, affordability is not achieved by speeches; it is achieved by cost reductions and productivity gains. As presently, you cannot have affordable houses without affordable raw materials and soft funds. Finally, improving real estate business in Nigeria requires deliberate institutional coordination. A fragmented policy environment, where land administration, physical planning, housing finance, taxation, and dispute resolution operate as separate islands, produces expensive inefficiency. The most practical path is to set measurable reforms at state and federal levels: time-to-register title, cost of title perfection as a percentage of property value, time-to-approve building plans, percentage of transactions processed digitally, mortgage penetration, foreclosure efficiency, and dispute resolution timelines. What gets measured gets improved.
Overall, Nigeria’s real estate sector can become a stronger engine of jobs, wealth creation, and social stability if we treat it as an ecosystem, not a collection of isolated transactions. Improve title certainty and land administration; render lands to be mobile, enforce planning tied to infrastructure; unlock long-term financing; streamline taxes and regulation; protect consumers; professionalize the value chain; adopt data and technology; and reduce construction cost volatility through local production and better logistics.
When these reforms converge, the business becomes more investable, more affordable, and more credible, allowing demand to translate into sustainable supply rather than perpetual frustration.
