Downturn: AMDC in credit enhancement, consumer-focused initiatives to stay afloat

As the economic downturn in Nigeria continues to bite harder with serious impact on various sectors of the economy, businesses are devising creative ways and initiatives that enable them to stay afloat.

For Alpha Mead Development Company (AMDC), the real estate development subsidiary of Alpha Mead Facilities Management and Services Limited, the way out is to keep innovating and remain focused.

“We must remain in business in spite of the limiting impact of the downturn; so we have come up with strategies that enable us to stay above the tide. Our Alternative Building Systems (ABT systems) are enhancing our competitive nature in the market and also helping us weather the storm through shorter project cycle”, Daramola Akindolire, Executive Director Real Estate at AMDC, disclosed in an interview.

AMDC, he added, has also adopted innovative products strategy through credit enhancement as a synergy that allows them to onboard more customers through credit enhancement using their bankable profile.

“Our consumer focused strategy enables us to lower the entry barrier and offer more flexible terms of payment to meet customer’s cash flow and expectations and increased consumer confidence. We have also decided to reduce cost of funding and through this we have introduced quite a lot of initiatives to reduce the cost of funding our development and, given the low liquidity in the market, we have also adopted long term supply chain strategy”, Akindolire hinted.

AMDC is the developer of the 112-unit Lekki Pearl Estate in Lagos through which it has demonstrated what technology is capable of doing in terms of affordable housing development with the completion of the estate’s show-house which was unveiled a couple of months ago.

The show-house is part of the company’s quest to deliver its projected 10,000 affordable and quality homes for mid-income Nigerians by 2020. “We have been able to demonstrate to the Nigerian built environment the role technology can play in the affordable and quality mix of housing development”, Femi Akintunde, MD/CEO of the company said at the unveiling event.

“Usually, one of the issues is the thinking that affordability impacts negatively on quality. But by embracing technology, housing development can be at cheaper rates while quality and precision can still be achieved to give home owners comfort, making the situation a win-win for both customers and the environment”, he added.

Akintunde explained that, “by embracing technology like we have done on this project, we have reduced material wastages to near-zero level, saved the environment from deforestation as our technology does not use wood in construction, and ultimately we will save our customers time because, moving forward, our goal is to efficiently maximize the technology to deliver houses in average of 10 days, post foundation”.

AMDC, he disclosed, has focused its development strategies on the mid-income class because they are the drivers of the economy and currently in their productive stages, adding that out of the reported 17 million housing deficit, an estimated four million gap exists in the middle income class.

Akindolire noted that execution had been the bane of delivering affordable and quality homes in the midd- income market, saying, “everyone talks about developing affordable homes for this market but execution is a big issue”.

Continuing, he said, “it is a pretty tough call to build quality and functional houses like we are doing and still sell them at affordable rates with low entry point such as N250, 000 monthly. But like I have said at different forum, AMDC is not just a development company; we are a home solution provider that understands the end-to-end process of the housing supply chain and is able to identify these bottlenecks to the advantage of our customers. And I think with this project coming on stream, we have been able to prove to the market that those words are not just fine marketing slogans, we mean them”.