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Developer completes Lekki Pearl Estate’s prototype house

By Happiness Otokhine
08 February 2016   |   2:09 am
In effort to deliver affordable and quality homes for middle-income Nigerians, Alpha Mead Development Company (AMDC), last week, revealed the completed prototype of its 112 unit Lekki Pearl Estate. The unveiling which had in attendance all stakeholders on the project, including the home subscribers, financial partners and development contractors held at the estate’s site recently.…
Aerial view of Lekki

Aerial view of Lekki

In effort to deliver affordable and quality homes for middle-income Nigerians, Alpha Mead Development Company (AMDC), last week, revealed the completed prototype of its 112 unit Lekki Pearl Estate.

The unveiling which had in attendance all stakeholders on the project, including the home subscribers, financial partners and development contractors held at the estate’s site recently.

Speaking at the event, the Managing Director of the company, Mr. Femi Akintunde, expressed delight that with the completion of the show house, AMDC is now able to show to the Nigerian built environment that technology can play significantly in the affordable and quality mix of housing development.

He said: “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.

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

Akintunde further said that AMDC has focused its development strategies on the middle income class because they are the drivers of the economy, and currently in their productive stages. He said out of the reported 17 million housing deficit, an estimated four million gap exists in the middle income class. He noted that these are bankable individuals who should be able to have decent and quality homes, but the current high entry level of the market has made this dream impossible.

“With an entry level of N6 million equity requirement in today’s housing market, only few of this class of Nigerians will be able to exit the rent market in their productive years. Self-building is also not an option because of the level of stress, wastage and time required to build a home for oneself in Nigeria today. So what we have done is to structure a payment plan that suites the lifestyle and income level of these Nigerians; such that in addition to a world-class building technology, we are currently building homes for middle income Nigerians for as low as N250,000 monthly”, he explained.

Akintunde also lamented the current housing situation in the country. He noted that with technologies like these form works, government at various levels is expected to start putting serious thoughts into social housing delivery because a substantial part of the housing deficit falls within the social housing space. He stressed that government will be able to build houses faster, and the cost of building will be minimal compared with the conventional building methods.

The Executive Director, Real Estate, AMDC, Damola Akindolire said execution has been the bane of delivering affordable and quality homes in the middle income market, saying; “We have not just used technology to solve the problems of affordability and quality; we are also responding to the challenge of delivery time. This show house was erected in an average of 10 days, post foundation. You can go round and look at houses that were termed affordable 12 months ago, how many of them are still at that pristine state? Some of them are already being renovated, and regrettably, at a huge cost to the buyers”.

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