Housing revolution begins in Lagos as Echo Stone deploys new building technology

What promises to be a revolution in the Lagos State housing sector has begun with the deployment of a new building and construction technology by Echo Stone and its local partners in the state.

Echo Stone is an innovative housing system developed to address housing shortages worldwide. As a technology, it is a lean design and construction concepts, value engineering, and procurement solutions. It is a proprietary approach to building sustainable communities beginning from programming through financing, planning, design, and construction.

A major high point of this technology is its speed of housing production such that it has capacity to produce four bedroom bungalows in just four days and also industrialises labour in the housing industry.

With this technology, the company will be producing 2,000 housing units as part of the Lagos Public Housing (LAPH) initiative which targets 20,000 housing units to be built over the next four years.

A ground breaking event was performed Thursday to commence the construction of the 2,000 units that will be built across three sites in Badagry, Imota and Ayobo areas of Lagos. Anthony Recchia, Echo Stone’s global CEO, disclosed at the event that work on the first 250 units had already started in Badagry.

Arguably, housing is one of Lagos State’s major challenges. A report by Pison Housing Company estimates housing demand-supply gap in the sprawling city at three million units. The report also estimates that 80 percent of the state’s residents live in rented accommodation and spend about 50 percent of their income on house rent.

Gbolahan Lawal, the state’s commissioner for housing, quoted a survey by his ministry which revealed that to close its housing deficit, the state needs to produce 20,000 housing units annually for the next 10 years. He added that it would require approximately ₦8 trillion to resolve the deficit at an estimated $10,000 per unit.

“But this will be difficult to accomplish, even if all other variables were constant, using the conventional method of building which is not only costly, but also takes a long time, say 12-24 months to deliver a housing unit”, Lawal observed.

“If we have to close this gap, there is need for mass housing and we need a technology that can make that possible. This is why and how we arrived at the joint venture initiative with Echo Stone”, the commissioner explained.

He was optimistic that with the Echo Stone technology, the LAPH initiative would achieve its purpose of delivering 20,000 housing units in the state in the next four years. He assured Echo State officials that there was a ready market for their products.

This initiative by the Lagos State government is just one aspect of efforts at addressing Nigeria’s 17 million housing deficit which is projected to hit 20 million units by 2025 when the country’s rapidly growing population is also projected to hit 200 million.

At the national level, Northcourt Real Estate, in its recent report, says there are on-going initiatives by the Federal Government to increase housing supply, pointing out that those initiatives are targeted at mass housing projects across 33 states of the country.

“The project would engage over 650 contractors to deliver 2,736 housing units, employing 54,680 people in the process”, said Ayo Ibaru, Northcourt’s chief operating officer, disclosing that the project’s strategy is to construct bungalows with courtyards in Northern region of the country and blocks of flats or condominiums in the South.

CHUKA UROKO