Enforcement of monthly rental policy to take effect before end of 2024— LASG

The Lagos State Government (LASG) has said that the enforcement of the monthly rent policy earlier announced would commence before the end of 2024.

Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, had in 2021 said the current one year upfront rental payment system where tenants pay in advance to property owners has become inadequate to address recent realities of an emerging city in the housing sector.

Sanwo-Olu made the recommendation at the 10th meeting of the National Council on Lands, Housing and Urban Development held in Lagos recently.

At the event, then Minister of Works and Housing, and former Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, corroborated Sanwo-Olu’s position, stressing that the yearly rental system had created inequality in the housing supply and widened the affordability gap for low-income earners.

Governor Sanwo-Olu had submitted a monthly rental system, which he said would be affordable to low-and middle-income earners discomforted by the yearly rent obligation.

He had called on policymakers to consider the suggestion and initiate a regulatory framework for the transition.

Sanwo-Olu, who remarked on the State’s rent-to-own programme of five percent down payment and six percent simple interest rate payable over 10 years, had announced that “we are working on another product, which is a purely rental system, where residents will pay monthly.”

The Special Adviser to Lagos State Governor on Housing, Barakat Odunuga-Bakare, reflecting on the policy said like what obtains in other climes where rents are collected monthly, the same would be enforced in Lagos..

“We all see what is being done in other climes, rents are collected monthly. Hence, we are looking and hoping that before the end of the year, or by early next year, we will be able to implement the policy of monthly rental,” she said during a recent press briefing of the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority in Ikeja, Lagos.

She added that the rental would be charged according to tenants’ earnings.

“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,” the Special Adviser said.

She mentioned that the N5 billion allocated for the monthly rental scheme was still set aside and untouched, she added attributing the delay in time to take off to the fact that the State Government is working to perfect the implementation of the policy.

“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,” Odunuga-Bakare said.