By Emeka Izuwah

Building or owning a home is a major lifetime goal desired by any working adult and this can be achieved by a series of conscientious and consolidated efforts-

Easy of access to land and land documentation: This is one of the most difficult hindrances to housing delivery. By law, all lands are held in trust by the various state governors but in practice, lands are owned by settlers whose boundaries are often never clearly defined.

You often have instances where two families or villages contending over the same portion of land and if you desire unencumbered access to such lands, you may have to buy it from the two contending parties.

Failure to do this may frustrate any development on that land as the unsatisfied party may employ diabolical means to settle scores. Also linked to this is the plethora of land speculating intermediaries who are ready to sell the same portion of land to as many people as show up.

The tendency to pay undetermined tolls at milestone levels of development and the squabbles arising thereon also add-up to the cost of development. After securing your land comes the necessary but oftentimes very difficult process of obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy , C of O, and Building plan approval.

These processes often linger beyond reasonable time limits as governments see them as veritable channels of income and make all sorts demands accordingly. The import of this delay is that you may not get financing for your project as long as these documents are not available.

Housing Estate in Lagos

No property firm can embark on any serious housing project without land free from all encumbrances and proper land documentation. Government should therefore revisit this area while also developing guidelines for developments in various suburbs to reduce the frustration of delays or even failures in Building plan approvals.

Mass housing estates development: Our present housing deficit is so acute that building individual house units along the road is simply a drop in the ocean when compared to the demand.

Mass housing estates must be developed by both the private and public sectors to cater for the upper, medium and lower income groups. While working as a Senior Resident Architect in the redevelopment of 1004 Estates in Lagos, I could not but wonder why several of such estates had not been built allover the country.

Mortgage Financing: The lack of a vibrant mortgage financing programme is most disturbing. While housing delivery in advanced nations is guaranteed by a vibrant mortgage system, one is dismayed by its gross under utilisation here, knowing fully well that housing projects cannot be sustainable financed by conventional commercial bank loans.

It is quite surprising that the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, is yet to see this sector as a veritable area for intervention. Building materials cost: About 60-70 percent of the cost of a building is expended on building materials.

It therefore follows that if we reduce the cost building materials, we automatically reduce the cost of housing. Major local components like cement and steel can be reduced by providing power to manufacturers while our wasteful use of wood can be replaced with re-usable plastics.

Site and Service Schemes: This is another area where government can jumpstart organised property development. Rather than develop housing estates, government or private sector developers can develop estates complete with all relevant infrastructure and sell parcels of land to the public to develop their own houses.

This option is not only cost effective, it ensures development in an orderly manner.

Building Co-operatives:. Staff of established companies can pool their resources together to build estates thereby benefitting from economies of scale in the process. This is increasingly becoming popular in places like Lagos especially among oil company staff.

Corporate housing Provision: Laws should be put in place compelling large companies to put in place modalities for staff to own their houses after a considerable length of time with them. These amongst others are the key action steps towards adequate housing delivery which is definitely a mission possible.

 Emeka Izuwah, an Architect, is the Managing Partner and CEO, Archiplex Consult, a Lagos-based architectural firm