Developers turn to rent-to-own initiative to stimulate demand, sustain business
As economic recession continues to bite harder and erode people’s buying power, real estate developers burdened with a large stock of houses that cannot find buyers are leveraging the rental market potential to stimulate demand by turning to rent-to-own homeownership initiative.
The initiative, which is adopted with the aim of enabling the developers to remain in business, allows prospective home owners to acquire houses, pay rent on them over a period of 10-15 years and, at the end of this period, own the houses.
Rent-to-own homeownership initiatives is, increasingly, gaining traction in the Nigerian property market and this is quite understandable considering that the rental market in this country is more active than the sales market.
A recent report on the housing market reveals that over 60 percent of the country’s 170 million people live in rented accommodation and in Lagos, the country’s commercial nerve centre, about 80 percent of its 20 million people live in rented accommodation and spend about 50 percent of their income on paying house rent.
CHUKA UROKO