BY OLASUNKANMI AKONI  & MONSUR OLOWOOPEJO

LAGOS—Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State, yesterday, said the state plans to review its housing ownership policy by introducing ‘Rent-To-Own’ policy, aimed at enabling residents especially the informal sector access to the Lagos Home Ownership Mortgage Scheme, Lagos HOMS.

Fashola, who spoke at a Town Hall meeting with tradesmen and artisans, Transport unions in Agidingbi, Ikeja, explained that the primary aim of the policy was to afford residents who could not meet the 30 percent mortgage equity to own house in the state.

According to him, “There is a new policy. It is slightly different from the mortgage scheme itself but it will ultimately lead to mortgage scheme. It will open access to more people who cannot afford mortgage, we call it rent-to-own scheme.”

He said that five months after the Lagos HOMS was introduced, they got feedbacks and commissioned a team to visit the traders and artisans, “to find out if our pricing was such what the artisans and traders can afford and we discovered that they could.”

The governor explained that the state government would help the informal sector operators to sanitise their records keeping in such a way as to qualify them for owing a home.