While the rental market awaits the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing to influence state houses of assembly and attorneys general to legislate against advance rent payment, private sector initiatives are offering tenants easy and less costly routes to renting houses.
One of such routes is Rent4less. This is a very simple product designed to help people pay flexible rent wherever they want to live or work. This means that a lack of lump sum of money to rent a space is no longer a barrier to renting houses or offices in desired locations.
For instance, someone who wants to live in Ikoyi and have an office in Victoria Island, but cannot afford these locations because of the two or three years rent landlords usually demand, can leverage Rent4less and live or work in these locations.
“This product seeks to prove that monthly rent payment is possible in Nigeria and people don’t have to pay for spaces they don’t need,” Damola Akindolire, managing director, Alpha Mead Construction Company (AMDC), told BusinessDay.
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AMDC is the initiator and promoter of Rent4less. The company, a subsidiary of Alpha Mead Group, is the developer of the Lekki Pearl and Green Park Estate, both in the Lekki axis of Lagos. It is one of a few developers that allow tenants to pay rent according to their income flow.
Rent4less is out to move both the rental market and renters away from annual rent to monthly rent regime as it obtains in other parts of the world. “If you earn your salary monthly, why should you commit to an annual single payment contract? Akindolire queried.
What this means is that if all a renter needs is a room in a decent area, Rent4Less helps him to live there by breaking the rent to the size of space he needs and for how long he wants it, even if it is monthly.
Rent4Less is for both residential and commercial spaces. One can rent a desk space or an office in Ikoyi or anywhere he wants and pay monthly. It saves him from locking money in rent for long and eliminates the fact that one must rent a minimum size of space to have as office or home.
The product also removes all unrelated and associated costs that make rent expensive and provide the customer with one solution.
“We are making sure that budget should not stop people from living or working where they want, and people should be able to pay for the size of space that they need. So Rent4less helps them to become efficient with their rent payment,” Akindolire assured.
For home seekers who want to buy through the affordable mortgage which the National Housing Fund (NHF) offers, the process has been made a lot easier and simpler by Alpha Mead.
The company is leveraging its relationship with the federal mortgage bank of Nigeria (FMBN) to process subscribers’ applications for NHF in a much shorter time than normal. In the last 9months, it has processed more than 100 applications with over 90 percent of them already approved.
“We have a dedicated mortgage desk that is working every day to help our subscribers through the process; our mortgage desk is the bridge between the FMBN, the PMB and the applicants,” Akindolire explained, adding that they have a very smooth working relationship with the apex mortgage bank.
