Gidi Plans Alternative Building System to Reduce Construction Cost

Fadekemi Ajakaiye

The MD/CEO of Gidi Real Estate Development Limited, Tobi Ajewole Akerele, developer of Epe Garden, has said they are considering alternative means of building that are self-sustaining; buildings don’t have to be with blocks, and with this, they will be able to bring down the cost of construction and at the same time give the best value to their clients.

Akerele stated this during the allocation of land to the first batch of buyers at Epe Garden, recently, adding that they have established “a new company called Gidi Civil Construction Limited and the plan is to help those who have acquired land from us to build. We did that because we want to build at a very affordable rate and at the same time, best quality.”

He said their intervention is to help reduce the nation’s housing deficit and that for this to happen, the first point of call is to get land. “Getting a good title land in Lagos is like passing through the tunnel, and we are helping people to scale through the first hurdle, we go extra miles to make it easy for people to acquire land

“A lot of Nigerians can’t afford to pay N5 million at once so what we do is to give them a payment plan of 12 or 24 months to make it very easy for them to be able to acquire it then and we also went further in the construction phase.”

On their target market, the CEO said, “Everyone is our target market, but we are very interested in the young ones. So, we have a campaign called ‘not too young to invest’ because Gidi is a company of young and vibrant, energetic Nigerians, we are crusaders of ‘not too young to invest’. No matter your age, as soon as you start having access to funds, start securing your future. We have a scheme we call, Land Banking, where individuals buy land and keep it for some period, then they can resell. Also, for our Nigerians in diaspora, who love to invest back home, there is no place like home. In the next 20 years, we want to make sure that Gidi will cater for at least 2% of the housing deficits in Nigeria.”

He said, “In the last 10 years, inflation has never met with the ROI (return on investment) rate on real estate, especially Lagos land. So many people who listened to us during the COVID-19 period that invested in land did not get affected. Land was appreciating when the Naira value dropped.

Gidi, he said, contributes to the real estate sector, stating, “We have taken a lot of people off from the unemployment market, we have a brokerage firm which partnered with us that has over 75,000 realtors, so indirectly some 75000 realtors are making money through our services. Our in-house staff alone is over 30, but in the real estate sector when we came, we said that we want to be different because we believe if everybody is going to the right, we believe that there are opportunities to the left.”