‘Current approach to housing provision not sustainable’

The current approach to building and delivering housing to Nigerians which involves costly, laborous and time-consuming is unsustainable if the country wants to close its wide housing gap, Femi Akintunde has said.

Akintunde, the MD/CEO of Alpha Mead Facilities and Management Company Limited (AMFacilities), who stated this in a brief interview with BusinessDay,  said that though as a company they believe that Nigeria has to meet its housing  gap, they don’t believe in the conventional approach t  housing, disclosing that  they have come up with an alternative to this conventional approach.

“What we have done now is to come up with a method that enables a faster production  and more quality buildings to deliver to the market, particularly to middle income earners, and that technology has done well in other developed countries  of the world”, he revealed.

Known as Modular Building System or Formwork Panels, Akintunde explained that “the new method allows you to build faster, and you know when you build faster  to the standard specification, your quality is guaranteed  and the cost of fund is reduced  due to shorter time frame.  Because of that, we are able to transfer the cost advantage to the customer and sell at affordable prices”.

The Modular Building System is already in use by Alpha Mead Development Company (AMDC), the real estate subsidiary of AMFacilities, in the development of their Lekki Pearl Estate—a mid-income community comprising 112 affordable housing units—in Lagos.

Akintunde informed that, by deploying this technology, AMDC has been able  to lower the entry level for middle-income home buyers from the current market average of N6 million to as low as N250, 000 monthly without any initial large deposit or collateral.

“We want to help middle income Nigerians who are unable to raise the large capitals most developers demand as  deposit, or are unable to build due to the large capital involved”, he added,  disclosing that given the high construction speed of this new technology, the company aims to deliver 10,000 housing units in the next five years.

For all of this to happen, Akintunde said government needs to create enabling environment for business to thrive, explaining that enabling environment for business to thrive starts from fiscal environment to legal and legislative environments that will make organizations and business run efficiently.

“If you look at the state of infrastructure in this country, it is one of the business enabling systems or structure and, if not available in adequate number, what happens is that businesses have to make up and fill up the gap and that adds to the cost of  producing and running businesses”, he noted .

According to him, government has to have a system of appraising the state of the  infrastructure in terms of provision and sustainability, pointing out that once the fiscal environment is in good order , power especially, telecommunication, roads, water supply, social services like good education system that produces  the quality of manpower needs, businesses will be run  sustainably in this environments. “Government must also ensure that social services like health is also provided. On legal environment, everybody wants to operate successful business in an environment where he is sure of sufficient legal protection for what he does and that there is  legislative process of enabling laws that do not hinder businesses”, he advised.