Stakeholders Decry Decline In Real Estate Activities

Stakeholders in the
building industrys have expressed worry over the all-time high residential vacancy rates in major cities in the country.
They fear that investors may have to wait for long periods before they could reap returns on their investments.
The stakeholders revealed this in an interactive forum held in Lagos, last Friday.
According to the Chief Executive Officer, Northcourt Real Estate, Tayo Odunsi, “the vacancy rate in residential buildings in Lagos is estimated at around 33 per cent, in Abuja,  it is 28 per cent and 13 percent in Port Harcourt. There is also no difference in retail development, which came down leaving a vacancy rate of between 33 and 50 per cent, among large shopping malls, apart from few blue chip developers, who were able to raise capital, it was a sorry tale for many others”.
Odunsi noted that the statistics were impacted by the delay in passing the budget last year, and the current economic recession.
He further stated that the delay shrunk companies and personal incomes in response to inflation, adding that based on this, investors in the sector may have to wait longer for any breakthrough in their investments.
On his part, the CEO of Reality Point Limited, Debo Adesana, noted that the  built environment was experiencing an anomality and regretted that the situation was so because, while the prices of houses are plummeting, the cost of land was skyrocketing, blaming it on the depreciation of the naira and unfixed cost of capital.
He therefore, stated that unless stakeholders took urgent steps, the sector, which had been hit by recession since last year, would not fare better this year, saying that recession forced investors to pull out from the equity market, leaving the government as the principal actor, which borrowed at ridiculous rate and stifled businesses.
The Business Development and Strategy Manager, Reality Point Limited, Akin Arogundade, noted the decline in foreign exchange impacted much  on the input components of the sector, which he said are largely import-based and called for a review of planning regulation, saying that the regulation was archaic and not dynamic in meeting realities on ground.