In its quest to deliver the proposed 10,000 affordable and quality homes for middle-income Nigerians by 2020, Alpha Mead Development Company (AMDC), last week, unveiled the completed show house 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 site on Sunday, January 31, 2016.
Speaking before the unveiling, Femi Akintunde, Managing Director/CEO of the company 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, if it embraces technology.
Addressing visitors at the event, 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; “everyone talks about developing affordable homes for this market but execution is a big issue. The truth is that it is a pretty tough call to build quality and functional houses like we are doing and still sell them at affordable rates with low entry barriers such as N250, 000 monthly. But like I have said at different fora, AMDC is not just a development company; we are a home solution provider who understands the end-to-end process of the housing supply chain and able to identify these bottlenecks to the advantage of our customers. And I think with this project coming on stream, we have been able to prove to the market that those words are not just fine marketing slogans, we mean them”.