At various times and in many ways, the Lagos State government has intervened in its housing sector, intent on protecting the interests of stakeholders from undue exploitation.
The state’s tenancy law of 2011 was enacted for the purpose of ensuring that both agency and legal fees do not exceed 10 percent of the annual rent each. This was specifically meant to shield renters from mindless landlords and their agents.
The state government has also intervened with the Lagos Home Ownership Mortgage Scheme (LagosHOMS), which sought to make home loans both affordable and accessible to low-income workers in the state.
The establishment of the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority (LASRERA) was to check the fraudulent activities of estate agents and land grabbers. It is also meant to ensure that both sitting and intending tenants are not unduly exploited.
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A new legislation called the Lagos Tenancy Law is currently in the works to ensure that both landlords and tenants are protected, and also to check the exploitative tendencies of estate agents who not only inflate house rents , but also charge outrageous fees.
But despite these interventions by the state government, residents of the state who want to rent houses pay almost double the house rent because agents don’t obey the legislations which provide that renters should not pay more than 10 percent of the rent cost.
There is widespread violations of existing legislations across the state’s rental market which is adjudged the most active in the whole of Nigeria. Many tenants still pay significantly above the legal limit, especially in areas dominated by informal agents.
Market watchers have raised concerns, blaming the situation on weak enforcement, unregulated practices, and the growing affordability crisis facing renters in this sprawling city, where the housing deficit that runs into millions is both qualitative and quantitative.
This situation becomes all the more painful given that it is the renters who suffer for agents’ non-compliance with the provisions of the various legislations or their weak enforcement.
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Very tenants are lamenting the exploitation by the agents but for Chidi Samuel, a single mother in Egbe area of Lagos, the case is more than pathetic. Chidi needed just a single bedroom, for which the rent was pegged at N350,000, but she ended up paying an additional N300,000 for both agency and agreement fees.
Kingsley Chinwendu, is another Lagos resident who is looking for a three-bedroom apartment to rent. That size of apartment where he desires to live goes for N3.5 million, but he could not pay for the one he found in that area because the agent wants him to pay N750,000 in addition to the rent cost, giving a total of N4.250 million.
If 10 percent was charged as stipulated by the Lagos legislation, Chidi and Kingsley would have paid N30,000 and N300,000, respectively, as agency fees, but that is not the case.
