Mr Akintunde Ayodeji is Head of Design and Business Development of the International Business Bureau Limited (IBBL). He spoke with Viewpoint Housing News in Abuja, suggesting that low income housing should be the target of developers since the high-end market is saturated. According to him, his houses could cost as low as 1.3 million even as quality is guaranteed. He expressed concern that some developers construct houses that would not satisfy needs of buyers. To turn the tide, IBBL is getting notable construction specialists to work on buildings, Ayodele stated, lamenting however, that in the past three years, business has been slow for developers in Nigeria.
Viewpoint: What specifically is the purpose of IBBL?
Ayodeji: The company has been in development for over 10 years now, with notable project in Ilorin, Kwara State which has over 3,000 units of houses.
Over the years, we realize that the building industry itself still has a lot of flops in Nigeria so in trying to correct some of these problems, we came up with what we call Construction Management. What construction management means is that you bring in key players from the development industries; say the painting people, woodwork, aluminium — we bring them together and manage the team.
That is just basically what construction management means. It is not as if we are no more developers. It is still the core business but we are trying to change the style to get quality and affordable houses for end users.
Viewpoint: Have you any relationship with Family Homes Fund?
Ayodeji: Yes! Right now, the Family Homes Fund is about the best fund around. One, what they do is fund mass projects. Family Homes Fund was borne out of necessity, in the sense that the World Bank funds are to the third world nations that are deficient in housing.
They came to Nigeria and said ok, here is a specific amount of money, let your country too put counterpart fund to that money, which was what gave birth to Family Homes Fund.
They don’t fund houses beyond a specific amount. They don’t fund expensive houses. They only fund affordable housing for the masses. That is why most of their targets are more of civil servants, low income earners and military personnel.
Viewpoint: We see that you are interested in low income housing. How affordable are the houses you construct?
Ayodeji: I mentioned our houses in Ilorin and they are low income houses which go for as low as N1.3 million or N1.4 million for one-bedroom bungalow while two-bedroom goes for N2 million. But now, because of inflation and all that, prices have changed. It is now N2.7 million for a two-bedroom bungalow.
The housing units and types differ from state to state. In a place like Abuja, because land is premium, we actually build them in blocks of flats.
They are like apartments, so an apartment of say 12 units of block of flats with three one-bedroom, eight two-bedroom, and maybe two, three-bedroom — it is called mixed housing. We try to mix those units together so you don’t have any in isolation – they look like single entities.
Viewpoint: How long have you been in the business?
Ayodeji: Personally, this should be my 16th year but as a company, this is about 22 years in the property industry.
Viewpoint: In the past three to four years, how has business been for you?
Ayodeji: Slow. At a point in the past, there was a boom in the housing sector in the sense that everybody was building for the rich. Now, they have like 10 to 15 houses already so they don’t need them anymore, yet developers were still building for those set of people.
Viewpoint: So, how many projects are you working on presently and how many are fully completed?
Ayodeji: Now, we have in Lokogoma and karsana and they are all still in 50 percent completion stage but we have one fully completed and occupied already in Gudu.
Viewpoint: What do you think can be done to encourage developers to build low income houses?
Ayodeji: They should realize the fact that, that market that everybody wants to go into is not there. It is filled up already. There is no point building at that rate. People are not doing that anymore, people just want things that they can afford.
If a civil servant earns N50,000 and you want him to rent a house of N750,000, how does he do that? There is no way he can do that with that amount of money he is earning. So we all have to sit down, go back to the drawing board and re-draw the system.
Knowing fully well that if somebody earns N50,000, he shouldn’t spend more than 30 percent of his annual income on a house, it means he has to go back. The amount he earns in a year is N600,000. Thirty percent of it is how much? N200,000. So conveniently, what he can afford to pay for a house in a year should be N200,000, because there are other bills to be paid.
That is the challenge; so really I don’t know, everybody has to realize this fact. It is not working anymore because there are so many abandoned houses that cannot be sold because of high cost.
Viewpoint: What is your relationship with Lafarge, First Aluminum and Royal Ceramic?
Ayodeji: What we did was to try and restructure the system and create confidence or gain confidence from the end users. Now, if you look around, there are some estates, I can’t mention names right now, even after buying those houses, if you are not careful, you will practically strip the house down.
It means what they are selling to you is not even what is acceptable. Most times, when you buy the house, you find out that you have to change everything in the house.
What we are trying to do now is, we go to trusted companies that are listed in the Stock Exchange, bring their expertise and their training, all these guys have their specific fields which they are specialized in; Lafarge does cement, concrete and structure works, First Aluminium does roofing sheets, windows etc, Royal Ceramic does tiles etc.
If I am selling to you a house built by Lafarge or your wall is being made by Lafarge, there is a certain level of confidence in you that that house should be strong as against me telling you that I just called one bricklayer to fix your house.
So we are trying to gain investors’ confidence that these houses can actually stand the test of time because of people that are handling those specific components.
So the concrete work is actually going to Lafarge, they are handling the sub-structure and the super-structure. Now, when they do that, the First Aluminium people come to fix the windows and the roofs. That is what they do, they do nothing else, they don’t know how to fix walls. Now, once they do that, the people for the tiles come fix their tiles and all the ceramic works like the WC and the rest and that is done. What these help to achieve is that they give guarantee on their job.
