UNILAG centre pledges support for cooperative housing

In its bid to boost housing delivery in the country, the University of Lagos Centre for Housing Studies has waded into the problems confronting cooperative societies venturing into the real estate sector.

The centre in a one-day free interactive workshop on housing and co-operatives societies titled: “Supporting Co-operative from Land Acquisition to Housing Construction: Tackling the Critical Challenges.” held at the faculty boardroom of environmental sciences, University of Lagos, Akoka, expressed readiness of the Centre towards offering necessary training programmes for co-operative members.

The Director of Studies, University of Lagos Centre for Housing Studies, Prof. Timothy Nubi who made this known said such training would link them with professionals as well as helped in carrying out action research in the area of cooperative housing.

Nubi, who is also the convener of the workshop, urged cooperative societies to engage the right professionals in their quest to assist members in homeownership. “Herein the Centre, you have a shoulder to lean on. Let us work together to re-engineer the Lagos State housing sector.”

He said interactive workshop was organised, with the purpose of ascertaining the critical challenges facing co-operative societies that have decided to intervene in the housing needs of their members.

“The intervention of co-operatives cut across various levels of activities: providing loans for land acquisition, loans for construction activities, purchasing land and even direct housing development”.

The first session which was mainly interactive provided an opportunity to rub minds between co-operatives that have acquired land, co-operatives that have built housing units and those that are looking to purchase land for housing purposes for their members with the hope that such animated discussion would helped cooperative members to learn from the experiences of each other.

Speaking at the second session of the workshop, the National General Secretary of the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN), Barrister Akintoye Adeoye, encouraged cooperatives to work in collaboration with REDAN members in the housing supply process

At the end of the workshop, participants agreed that one of the major problems they faced in the housing sector was the activity of local landowners popularly known as ‘Omo-oniles’, who tend to elicit multiple payments for land and also resell lands that have not been built upon.

They also called attention to the slow documentation process for acquired lands, as the co-operatives said they were eager for the state government to have a special window for land registration for them as well as urged relevant bodies to support them in the area of finance to start building construction because majority of their members are low income earners.