By Kingsley Adegboye

UPDC Plc, a property development and investment company that develops, sells and manages real estate assets across Nigeria, has noted that its future outlook is to deepen its participation in the property market.

Making the disclosure at the just concluded Media Forum in Lagos, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of UPDC Plc, Mr Odunayo Ojo who said in his review of the performance of the company in the year 2025, stated that “To the future from 2027 going forward, we are currently looking at new projects to deepen our participation in the market. One of the projects is the one we call Project Alpha. When it’s time to unveil the project, we’ll come back and we’ll do a project on build, but it’s about 30 hectares of land, also targeted at the same demographic, middle income.

“And Project Beta is also to be released, which is between 40 and 50 hectares of land. Again, it is to deepen our development footfall, and this would assure our customers that UPDC is not resting on its fours and resting on it’s previous performance. We are a future looking organization. We are trying to guide the company against complacency, and we continue to deliver quality products and services to our target market.”

Ojo, who disclosed that there was growth in profitability last year, said “So, one of our key objectives going forward is that we want to continue to deepen the pipeline of our project. So, as we move from Prompton City two and three, to four and five, as we move into Project Alpha and move into Project Beta and beyond, we will continue to execute flawlessly.

“We will continue to focus on our service plots primarily, but on an opportunistic basis. We also intend to do top structure development on a case by case basis, either through generator partnerships or through selected clientele. We will build homes, but primarily, we have seen that infrastructure is a huge gap in the market, and UPDC has the capital and the experience to deliver infrastructure where other developers can come and build.

So, that is one of our key objectives going into the future. We also intend to scale our other businesses, especially the advisory business. This is an area where we see the largest gap. Very few companies are offering real estate advisory services because the capability is not available in the marketplace.

“For instance, asset management, portfolio management, institutional investors, it is something that most of the time is done by financial advisors, but it is very difficult to find real estate professionals who are vast in this area. UPDC has a unique opportunity because we have the talent in-house, and we have the proprietary knowledge to be able to implement world class services in our advisory side of the business.

“Part of our advisory business is also what we call development management. So, for institutional investors, family offices and high net worth individuals that do not necessarily want to get their hands dirty, but they want to participate in real estate investment. UPDC is available to develop for third party clients, and we are doing this for a lot of clients as we speak, it’s a combination of project management and development management. So we take it from start to finish. We help you develop your properties for a fee. So in those instances, we are rendering a service to our customers.

“One of the things that we also want to do is that we also want to get back into the institutional investment market. So, UPDC is planning a programme of capital raise over the next couple of months and years. We are currently having discussions around coming back to the market for rights issue capital market, and also promoting a Real Estate Fund. UPDC has done it before with our REIT but this time around, we want to come back to the market with a potential 100 billion naira real estate fund that will participate in different value chains of real estate, mostly real estate investment and real estate development.

“So, we believe that this capital raise will solidify the position of UPDC in the marketplace. So, conversations are already going on, and at the appropriate time, we will also come back to shed more light as to the structure of this capital raise intervention. But that is a strategic objective that UPDC wants to achieve. And finally, looking at what it will take to make these things happen, we’ll continue to deliver our promise in our development companies.

“We will continue to look at high growth locations. We are also looking at diversifying our locations so that we will meet our customers exactly where they are. Wherever there is a growth corridor, and there are many of them in our different states of the country, we will go there. We will deliver quality. We will help solve the gap in the housing deficit in the wider customer rates that we see. 

“Our other businesses, like facility management, will continue to deliver promises. Property management advisory and hospitality will continue to be shining light in their respective segments. “Our people, it is all about the people, and this is both internal people that work with UPDC and external people, like our stakeholders that we’re talking to today. We will continue to foster good relationships with all our stakeholders and finance is very key. As I’ve said, we want to go into the field. This is the next phase of our capital raise to shore up the financial base of the company.”