Subscribers anxious over developer’s endless delivery promises

For subscribers to Teju Royal Garden Estate, worry, unease, apprehension and anger may not sufficiently describe or capture their feeling over two years of snail-paced construction activities and the developer’s unending shifts in the delivery date of the relatively low cost estate in a Lagos suburb.

Teju Royal Garden, a 1,000-unit mixed-use estate being developed by Multi-purpose Infrastructure  Development and Construction Company (MIDC) presents a classical case of average Nigerian property developers who set out with a project without a clear vision of how and when they are to deliver their products to prospective buyers.

When the estate was introduced into the property market early 2013 through a media tour/conference addressed by the developer, prospective buyers were assured that the first phase of the estate comprising 750 units of different house-types would be delivered by December of the same year.

From December 2013, the developer has taken the subscribers through a litany of delivery dates beginning with February to April, June, August to the second week of December 2014 when the developer, at his wits end, became evasive and incommunicado in some cases.

“This is 2015, two whole years on, yet nobody knows when these houses would be ready”, one of the subscribers lamented, saying that all his financial calculations based on the December 2014 date fell through, leading to very challenging readjustments he was finding very difficult to cope with.

According to the subscriber, he would have been less uneasy if he had not been able to meet his financial commitment as demanded by the developer, explaining that as against 20 percent commitment demanded by the developer, he and some other subscribers had been able to make well over 50 percent deposit for the houses.

Though the estate’s initial focus was on low income earners, it has attracted mostly mid-income earners from an oil and gas company, a teaching hospital, a media organization, Lagos State ministry, private and corporate individuals, business men etc.

When BusinessDay visited the estate at the weekend, it was largely sleeping with skeletal activities going on at a few housing units where one of the subscribers told this reporter that after the December delivery date failed, “I told my family that, rain or sunshine, we must pack into our house before Easter”.

One of the site managers however, explained that the company was still on Christmas break, assuring that starting from Monday (yesterday), the estate would come  alife as their General Manager had directed that  most of the units must be ready before the middle of February.

BusinessDay recalls that Teju Royal Garden came to the market with attractive offers which, perhaps, explains the huge demand it has seen that seems too much for the developer to cope with.

The estate comprises different house-types including 100 units of one-bedroom bungalows; 200 units of two-bedroom bungalows and  450 units of detached and semi-detached three-bedroom bungalows, giving a total of 750 housing units for the first phase.

According to Emmanuel Obire, the MIDC’s MD/CEO, one-bedroom bungalow goes for N2.5 million; two-bedroom, N4.5 million; three-bedroom semi-detached, N6.5 million and three-bedroom detached, N7.5 million, adding, “Abbey Building Society Plc is providing buyers mortgages based on the National Housing Fund (NHF) which charges 6 percent interest rate, but while the NHF application is still being processed, the bank will provide an interim commercial mortgage on which interest rate is in the region of 18-20 percent”.