Inagbe Island: A real estate destination at middle of nowhere

In more ways than one, man has either disrupted or exploited nature for his advantage and this explains how a must-visit real estate destination has been created in Inagbe—a hitherto sleeping island that exists at the middle of nowhere.

On this island with about four million square-metre land area, Gran Imperio Group—Nigeria’s young but very ambitious real estate investment and development company—has, in just 12 months, built a resort of international dimension and concept with almost 100 percent local content.

Bounded by the calm Ocean with its caressing waves and the Lagoon ruffled intermittently by the marine activities of its neighbourhood, the resort, called Inagbe Grand Resort and Leisure by its promoters, has changed for good the original character and stature of Inagbe as an island.

“What we have here now is a city we have created at the middle of nowhere called Inagbe Grand Resort and Leisure; it is very Nigerian and pan-African because most of the products we have used here are basically produced either in this island or sourced from several local companies we have partnership and alliances with”, explained Adeyeye Ogunwusi, Gran Imperio’s MD/CEO, during a tour of the resort by journalists at the weekend.

The essence of creating this city, Ogunwusi explained further, is to showcase a masterpiece to the entire world in form of tourism and also for people to come and explore good things and know that such things could come out of Nigeria.

Though patronage of this tourist destination which takes only 20 minutes ferry ride to reach has been quite encouraging, it has however, always been a harvest of corporate clients and high networth individuals including First Bank, Stanbic IBTC, Nestling, KPMG, PWC, Nigeria Guinness, Peak Milk manufacturers etc and this does not fully realize the promoters’ plan and purpose for the resort.

“We don’t want this place to be for the elite alone, but that it should cut across board. That is why we have introduced a product called ‘Explore’ through which we want people to come and explore one of Nigeria’s best kept secret”, Ogunwusi said, pointing out that the secret is in the air which is very clean, and the mbience/environment which is very natural and close to nature with animals of various kinds moving freely within the island.

Continuing, he explained that “the ‘Explore’ product is a Loyalty Programme that we are working out for members of the public to come and experience this place in its natural ambience. It is very easy to do this. The minimum points a client can get from this Explore Card is 25,000 and each point costs N2. With this you can experience everything we have here and from there, he keeps generating his points on regular basis”.

According to him, the average of N35,000 charged as room rate per night on the island might be unaffordable for the ordinary folks who would like to patronize them, hence the Explore Loyalty Programme is structured in such a way that it can reduce this room rate by as much 50 percent.

“What we are trying to do is to attract attention and bring concentration to remote places like this place and with this objective, we want to see such locations develop on gradual basis. Taking this place as an example, you can see how we have been able to develop this place into a city within 365 days and moved its population from 10 to thousands of people living here. A lot of people have migrated from the Lagos metropolis to take work here. So far, we have 150 direct jobs and over a thousand indirect ones”, Ogunwusi informed.

CHUKA UROKO