‘We strengthen ourselves a lot in economic research because the real estate market follows the economy’

TAYO ODUNSI is the new chairman of Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Nigeran Group. Odunsi is also the chairman of Northcourt Real Estate and Founder/CEO, Africa Build, a relatively young, technology-driven company that is out to fill the data gap in real estate. In this interview with CHUKA UROKO, Property Editor, BusinessDay, he speaks on a wide range of industry issues including the challenge of data in real estate and the role of Northcourt in offering solutions. He also speaks on his reasons for becoming RICS chairman, among other salient issues. Excerpts

To many people whose paths have crossed yours, Tayo Odunsi is just an estate surveyor and valuer who recently became the chairman of Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Nigeria Group. Beyond this, what else about you would you like to share?

I am Tayo Odunsi by name, a Christian, husband, father, chartered surveyor, and a real estate professional. I have done real estate all my life. The first place I worked was Demola Daudu & Associates, a firm of chartered surveyors under Demola Daudu. I was in my second year at the university when I started working with him. I started my career before finishing school. I did well in school and this was because estate management, which I studied at the University of Lagos, is a practical course. At times, when I wrote, my lecturers wondered because I wrote beyond what was covered in class. I wrote from practical experience.

Also, the interest was genuinely there. My mother advised me to go for estate management because she saw my interest. Similarly, as I raise my children now, I am watching them to see where their interests lie so I can advise them on what course to take while investing and making the necessary preparations for them.

Take us through your early working years and how that prepared you for what you are doing currently

When I finished school, I joined Yinka Ogunsulire who was the head of real estate at that time at ARM. That company later pulled out and became Mixta but is still part of the ARM Group. While at ARM, I saw the importance of finance in real estate. I wanted to understand funding so, I started seeking a job in any company that finances purely real estate and I found out it was mostly mortgage banks.

So, I postured for it and got a job at GtHomes which is now Imperial Homes. I spent a couple of years there and went for my masters at the University of Reading, UK where I studied Real Estate Finance and Investment, and came back to my desk at GThomes.

I had resigned because there was no room for study leave but there was a clear understanding that I would return but upon my return, my appetite for more salary increased. So, I sought other roles and got two offers. But I went for FBN Capitals which is now FBN Quest. I was in the asset management team, responsible for structuring real estate funds.

At what point did you start forming the idea of setting up your own company that eventually gave birth to Northcourt Real Estate?

It was at FBN Capital that I looked at my whole career I saw that data was always a problem. I needed a lot of data so I gathered some students to get data for me because you can’t make investment decisions without showing some data.

So, because I was the associate responsible for the real estate fund, I had to organize things. And I had seen the importance of these things when I went to the UK for my master’s. I knew that there was money behind it and so, I said I would form a company that would be focused on making data available for real estate, and that was how I started Northcourth.

When I started Northcourt, I remembered what one of my lecturers said—that the most important thing for a company is to maintain good cash flow. He added that sometimes, what a company wants to do, it may not be able to make a lot of money from day one. So, sometimes you have to do what you don’t want to do to stay afloat. That was the case of Northcourt.

I can’t forget our first report. We started in 2013 and we published our first Nigeria Real Estate Market report in 2013; we did a 2014 outlook. The document was 13 pages. In that report, we got all the senior people we knew in the industry and some other professionals to also just tell us their outlook and we put them inside the reports. But then most of our revenue was coming from facility management. We had done some projects that we were managing which enabled us to stay afloat.

Many entrepreneurs believe that partnership or collaboration is the catalyst needed to strengthen and stabilise young companies. What did you do in your own case?

My partner, Ayo joined officially after a year of assisting from the background. Things started to kick off and we brought in several ideas; we were very big on branding, using technology, and just doing anything that we knew would be cutting-edge. We did quite a lot of event marketing which we pioneered. Three to four years later, the company started winning awards, as our predictions were coming true.

We strengthened ourselves a lot in economic research because the real estate market follows the economy. So, if you’re just a real estate professional, you want to be reporting on real estate, you have to base it on the economy by understanding how it functions and how it affects the real estate market to make good predictions.

We have some countries that are like Nigeria and so when we see what those countries have gone through and what it led to, it gives us insight that Nigeria may go through this, and have the same implications. Sometimes those are very easy ways to make predictions but many people don’t know this. It’s just about studying and being research-led.

We thank God the company operates in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and actually across Nigeria. And, of course, we’ve done a lot outside Nigeria, especially in West Africa like Ghana and Abidjan. Ghana is our biggest focus. We’ve not done much in East Africa. We’ve done in Central Africa where we did something for the IMF.

Read also: If you have cash, it is time to invest because the only direction real estate market is going is upwards

Recently, you stepped down as the CEO of Northcourt and your partner, Ayo, stepped in. Was that action statutory or just a matter of corporate governance convenience?

I had a 10-year mandate, which elapsed last year. So, I had to stand down as CEO. Northcourt is 11 years old now. It entered its 12th year last November. Last year, I founded Build Africa as I couldn’t retire before 40. I needed a job. Build Africa is one of my passions. Because, you know, I recently did a personality test, and I found out that I have a personality similar to Nelson Mandela. Just someone who lives for a purpose, who wants to just solve a problem and if money comes from it, that’s fine.

In real estate, data is a big issue. Some people will tell you there is no data in this sector to guide investment decisions. How far have you gone with closing that gap?

As regards the data problem, we’ve solved this to some extent. Nobody comes to this market now and says, there is no data. There is now some data. When I started my career, there was no Northcourt, there was no data. There was no estate intel. Those companies now exist, so the problem is being solved and I’m sure these companies will solve it even better.

A while ago, you mentioned a new company you have just set up called Build Africa. What gap is the company out to fill?

Another problem I picked up after the data is affordable housing. As you can recall, I wrote a book on it six years ago. But I said, over and above writing a book students can read and all of that, I said what can we do? Where can I make the biggest dent? I researched and found that a lot of times people build houses more expensive than they should. One is because the market is very opaque. As we are here now, you don’t know how many square metres this room is, how much it goes for, and how much it costs to build per square metre.

Because I am a professional if I tell you that it is N100,000, you might just believe me, but actually it might have cost N50,000 and so I have doubled your cost. Build Africa aims to bring transparency into the supply of real estate, helping people to understand how much it costs to build and helping people to buy those building materials easier at a more affordable price.

Now, if we raise money and build large stores in different places, it will never be able to cover the country. So, we say, we must use technology. And so that’s when we went to the electronic commerce route, where everything we sell, all our prices, everything is on a platform.

You can check the price of every building material and it brings transparency to it. What we are hoping to see is that as our platform becomes more prevalent, it forces other people to start selling and acting more responsibly, because now there is someone who is publishing the prices, and someone is clarifying to everyone that this is what it is.

We have a store today, it is on the web, iOS. You can download the app on your iOS device and all your Android devices. It’s all available. We also have WhatsApp chat features that you can use to engage to buy building materials. But to be honest, the e-commerce platform is not what I am most excited about. What I’m most excited about is what we’re still building, which helps people to know how much it will cost to finish a project, and bring a lot of transparency to these sorts of things.

You said you have been involved in providing data for the real estate market. Tell us more about what Northcourt is doing in that space. How much of your data is out there in the public domain?

This question is a bit surprising because you’ve seen our reports. So first, Estate Intel, for instance, provides raw data, and we provide information and advice. That’s what’s in our report. Information is processed data, Estate Intel will give you raw schedules, and you can make your deductions yourself. But, you know, because we are originally chartered surveyors, we advise. That’s our work. We can’t just tell you the price and yield in locations. We have to explain it to you in measurable terms and it is seen in our reports.

We don’t quote someone else, we put it in our reports that it is Northcourt, we have field workers who have worked with us all over Nigeria for as long as five years. And, in fact, it would have been longer but they get older, and move to other professions. But what we always make sure is that as you are leaving, you are bringing a replacement you have groomed. We get the data and put them in a nice format or report, then explain it and make deductions. So, I guess that is what you know us for, giving advice and forecasting the market. It is all based on data, not conjecture.

What I would say is that it was predestined that I would do this because when I was in Demola Daudu, my boss then, made me start keeping data on the price list. That is the information Northcourt started with, so our data is as far back as 20 years. Our mandate to make real estate transparent is what we do with our real estate reports, the free one, the outlook, and the half-year. We do it for Ghana and Nigeria. That report is our report card. It demonstrates without doubt that we have the competence to do it. So, people engage us from different locations. We’re currently in Ibadan doing projects; we’ve just finished projects in Ekiti, and we have another project in Akure. This is apart from a lot of things going on in Lagos and Abuja.

Now, let’s talk about RICS. Before someone decides to take up a position in an association, he must have seen what is not working according to expectations or he may have seen a lacuna he would like to fill. In your case, what really motivated you to become RICS chairman?

You know, people like Tayo Aderinokun and Fola Adeola have never been presidents of Nigeria but they’ve transformed Nigeria in ways that many presidents can never do. What do I mean? I’m not too old nor am I too young to remember when you go to a bank, and what you are going there to do is to collect a number that tells you when you will receive banking services.

But these men have banked, and studied banking and finance. At a point they said, we can do something transformative, that can let people get banked immediately. And you and I know the story of new-generation banks. People worked with them, learned, left and started their own. I studied estate, saw how estate firms were run and, to a large extent, I could have said, let me go to another industry that is more flashy, where they’re doing things more professionally.

But I said, those industries have already had those problems solved, why can’t I stay in this one God has put me in and bring solutions? And that’s what we did with Northcourt. Without being told, I know the impact of the way we ran Northcourt, the way things are being done transformed others because people saw that we were getting the best talents. A company of five years old, collecting talents from the big boys. You know, back then, I didn’t hire people because the CEO was a mentor but the staff wanted to leave and join us. They wanted to join us because of the way things were being done and we were getting customers, people were pulling out their properties and giving to us.

So, I have seen that there are certain things you do that are worthy of emulation, but you can only do so much when you are in a position that allows you to regulate how things are done, to create standards. It’s even a bigger platform than your company and that’s why I joined RICS. I joined the RICS many years ago, but I became a member of the exco eight years ago. I joined as assistant secretary, served one term of two years, I became secretary and served two terms. I don’t know, maybe I did it well, so I served twice, for four years.

Then recently, I was vice chairman for two years, and then I became chairman. So, I am not new to this system. I’ve interacted with different countries in Africa at the RICS level and even internationally. I’ve seen a lot of the struggles and progress we’ve made. We’ve helped in setting standards for all the other surveying professions. But the reason why I took up chairmanship is because there’s nothing like being in the driver’s seat.

In specific terms, what difference will your chairmanship make in the life of the institute in the next two years or more?

We had our very first exco meeting a couple of weeks ago and I found out that things are about to change drastically for the better. So, it’s good we’re having this conversation now because I look forward to, by God’s grace, reading these things in two years, looking back, and just comparing what we have been able to achieve. What is the basic difference between RICS and the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV)? What is really royal about RICS?

I’m sure you know that everything that was set up by the Queen or the Crown is Royal. So, there’s the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects. All these are set up on that British charter. So, the RICS was originally a body set up by the crown to regulate all the chartered surveying professions, building surveyors, land surveyors, quantity surveyors, and estate surveyors, and now included construction and project managers. So, it is about everybody in the built environments except engineers. They have something else for the engineers.

So, those surveying professions are regulated heavily in the UK by the RICS, which, as with everything UK, always transfers to other countries. And that’s how the RICS came into Nigeria 60 years ago. The RICS has been there for 60 years. I’m the 32nd chairman of the RICS in Nigeria. The elite of chartered surveying professionals tend to be members of the RICS because they are regulated very heavily by the UK. So, it’s a high calling. You can’t have skeletons in your cupboard and you just go and join RICS; you need to be sure of what you are doing.

Nobody is perfect, but when they unveil it, they see that maybe there’s some error or misunderstanding. You are professional, well-trained, and well-qualified. It takes a lot to get qualified. So, the uniformity is that RICS governs several surveying professionals, while NIESV is about one of the surveying professions.

Members of the Nigeria Institute of Surveyors (NIS), that is the land surveyors, and those of the Nigerian Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS) can also join RICS and even architects who are project managers or construction managers can also join RICS. So, it’s like an umbrella body for professionals in the built environment that seeks to ensure the people are getting regulation and oversight from the RICS body.