Access to land, our greatest challenge –Developer

The Chief Executive Officer of Realty Point limited, a Real Estate Development Company, Mr. ‘Debo Adejana, has identified lack of access to land as one of the challenges confronting real estate developers in Nigeria.
Adejana, who spoke exclusively with Blueprint recently in Abuja, however, advocated a review of the land tenure system to address the problem.
Also, he called for a single digit loan for developers in order to actualise the government’s housing for all programme.
He said: “Our challenges are access to land, the difficulty in accessing the land for real estate development is a problem. So our land tenure system needs to be reviewed in terms of value and application.
“The other challenge is that of finance in the demand and supply side because the providers of housing lack the appropriate finance. So, single digit or good digit interest rate funding should be made available and for example, the buyers also use to quote that they have a lot of deficit which means they don’t have a lot of demand for housing.
“They are not backed with the economic power that is required to purchase and that is mostly because appropriate mortgage is not available. The financing element has been affected by a number of things.
“One, is the type of money that is available and total funds available in the finance sector and real investment development sector. Another problem is how somebody can get his money back when he is not paying mortgage in the short term because real estate sector it is a long term project.
“Three, is the kind of laws we have especially about how somebody can get his money back if that person is not paying mortgage quickly . These are some of the things we need to look at. There are some other problems ,but I will say that majorly these are the key ones”.