Lagos vows to enforce monthly rental policy
According to Barakat Odunuga-Bakare, Special Advisor on Housing to Lagos State Governor, the state’s monthly rental programme will put into effect either early in 2025 or before the end of 2024.
She made this statement at the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority’s news conference in Ikeja, Lagos.
“We all see what is being done in other climes, where rent is collected on a monthly basis,” she stated. We therefore hope to be able to put the monthly leasing policy into effect before the year ends or even early in the next one. Additionally, the rent would be assessed based on the income of the tenants.
The good part about it is that we would be test-running it first within the public sector since we can ascertain how much everybody is earning, and once we see that it works in the public sector, we can now push it out to the private sector.”
Odunuga-Bakare also stated that the N5bn allocated for the monthly rental scheme was still intact.
She continued, “The last administration that initiated the monthly rental scheme was coming to an end when the scheme was to be introduced. Now, we have a new administration and the governor wants the scheme to come into effect by the end of this year or early next year.”
Recall that in 2021, the Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, had said the current rental model, in which tenants pay yearly rent in advance to property owners, has become inadequate to address contemporary realities in the housing sector.