The man behind Nigeria’s largest private residential development

Andy Elerewe didn’t start out building estates. He started out writing about them – and that, he says, changed everything.

Long before he was managing director and chief executive officer of AIBEN Properties Limited, Elerewe was a young journalist in Lagos, running an independent community newspaper with a handful of colleagues, dependent on adverts from small businesses to keep it printing.

It is, on the surface, an unlikely origin story for the man now overseeing what AIBEN describes as Nigeria’s largest private residential development. But Elerewe traces a direct line from that first newsroom to HUTU Prestige, the sprawling mixed-use development rising outside Abuja.

“I didn’t study journalism – my dad was a journalist, so I grew up in a home of journalists,” he said. “Even though I studied management and accounting, I delved into journalism very early. That was how I started.”

From the newsroom to the housing beat

Elerewe’s path into real estate ran through the newsroom, not around it. After cutting his teeth on Lagos’s community press, he moved to Abuja and joined Sun newspaper around 2008, where he was assigned to cover housing.

“That was my first contact with real estate,” he said. “Before then, I’d never built anything. My dad didn’t have anything to do. I’d never built any houses. I always wondered about those who build houses and do real estate. I thought of them as something very special.”

Covering the sector connected him to its core players, and he was eventually appointed special assistant to the then-president of the Real Estate Developers Association of Nigeria (REDAN) – a role that pulled him deeper into the industry he had been reporting on. “I began to see things. I began to develop passion,” he said of that period, describing his focus at the time as ensuring the industry was covered professionally, with accurate information reaching the people who needed it.

That proximity to developers, he says, is where the idea of building his own project first took hold. He briefly served as managing director of a real estate firm, Woods and Bricks, before stepping away to found his own company.

A name formed by a powerful union

AIBEN’s origin is more personal than most corporate names suggest. “The name is a combination of my name and my wife’s name,” Elerewe said. “It was formed right in the bedroom. We were thinking about it – okay, we want to do this, what name should we give it? We tried the formula around so many names. A stands for Andy, Ben stands for Benedetta.”

Benedetta Elerewe, a certified engineer, has been a director at the company from the start, overseeing technical services. AIBEN was formally registered in 2014, and its first project – Barcelona Villa – followed in 2015. “It’s always very emotional when you go back and try to remember what you did first,” Elerewe said. “It’s still standing now. If you juxtapose it with other projects done around there, I think it still stands out as probably one of the best – even though it was our very first project.”

A philosophy built on determination, not capital

Elerewe is candid that AIBEN’s early years were defined more by scarcity than momentum. “Right about then, we were grappling with trying to raise funds,” he said. “But for me, money is important in any business – I don’t think it’s as important as your own determination to make it.”

That distinction – between capital and conviction – recurs throughout his account of the company’s growth. “One of the fundamental reasons for getting into business isn’t making money,” he said. “It’s important to optimise your business, to scale up, to do all of that – but what’s important is creating value. Once you create value, every other thing falls into place.”

He describes the setbacks along the way – including an expensive, difficult expansion into Lagos that the company later retreated from not as failures but as a kind of professional conditioning. “I don’t see those things as challenges,” he said. “Rather, I see them as tools that are meant to sharpen you up, form your ideas, and raise you up for the bigger challenges to come. It never really stops.” “I’ve always had this very strong conviction that I have to make it. I have to be the best at what I do. That, for me, is everything.”

Reframing real estate as institutional infrastructure

Elerewe describes AIBEN’s growth as tracking a shift he made deliberately: from executing individual projects to building alliances and, eventually, financial structures around them. “One of the major turnarounds for us came when we started opening up to alliances,” he said, describing a reputational logic in which disciplined execution attracts investment. “When you do things rightly, when you play by the rules, people will watch you, and you’ll have that perception about you as someone who is going somewhere.”

That thinking has since evolved into what he describes as an investment-portfolio model – allowing investors to hold, value, and transfer equity in AIBEN developments much as they would financial assets. “Investing in what we do now is more like holding a share,” he said. “It’s way beyond just buying land.”

HUTU Prestige as the culmination

For Elerewe, HUTU Prestige – described in the company’s own account as currently the largest housing project of its kind in Africa, with plans to expand further – is less a single project than the point his entire career has been building toward. He frames it as a direct answer to Nigeria’s housing deficit and a deliberate departure from what he calls “the mundane way of real estate.”
“It has never really been about money for me,” he said. “It’s about being part of a legacy project – one that outlives me, outlives my bank, and outlives whoever invests in it. A project that can truly answer to the future needs of the country.”

It is a notably long-time horizon for a company chairman to set for himself – one that traces back, by his own account, to a young reporter in Lagos who once thought developers were “something very special,” and decided, eventually, to become one himself.

Andy Elerewe is MD/CEO of AIBEN Properties Limited.