Banks, NMRC in talks to ease property title hurdles

The Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC) and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) have teamed up with banks, including the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN) to ease the huddles in transferring property titles.

Property title transfer means the change of real estate ownership from the seller to the buyer. It usually involves removing or adding a person to the property title (or ownership) by the current owner. It becomes necessary mostly during property refinancing when a financial institution may demand that the property owner add or remove someone from the title to be eligible for a mortgage.

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Due to inherent difficulties in making the transfer, which generally discourages investment, the CBN spearheaded the review of mortgage administration law to ensure that there is a streamlined process of how to get titles by making it less opaque.

“Recently, we had a meeting which the Central Bank spearheaded and was held in our office. The federal mortgage bank was there, all the banks were here. We agreed to dissect the law again. The initial one was done by NMRC about 10 years ago; we decided that it needed a review,” Kehinde Ogundimu, CEO of NMRC, told BusinessDay in an interview.

The expectation is that when this is done, it will not only facilitate real estate transactions but also encourage investment in a sector where lack of data and opaque transactions have made several investors, especially foreign ones, hold back investment.

On the data challenge in the sector which, according to Paul Onwuanibe, Group CEO, Landmark Africa, makes it difficult to track and identify market trends and properly cater for market demand, Ogundimu disclosed that NMRC has signed a MoU with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) to produce a national housing data to guide investors.

“We have also signed a MoU with the National Population Commission (NPC). We’re bringing together all these players into the national housing data committee that the housing minister is to set up soon. There was a meeting we had with the minister recently where we led that coalition to his office,” Ogundimu revealed.

He stressed that Nigeria needs credible housing data, pointing out that, across Africa, they have been working with the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in South Africa which works with every country and has come up with 117 data elements with which investors can make comparative analysis among African states.

Given the size and value of Nigeria’s housing market, investors worry that investment in the real estate sector remains largely sub-optimal. As of 2023, the country’s housing deficit was estimated at 28 million units while the market value was put at N21 trillion.

The country is said to be on a steady population growth of about 2.4 percent annually, meaning that the market will continue to grow, yet it is not seeing the kind of investment that will be enough to march the potential.

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“We must have credible data to enable us to know how real the deficit we are talking about is; it may be that we are over-building or have not even scratched the surface,” Adedayo Adedipe, an architect, told BusinessDay.

Adedipe explained that because of a lack of data, it is difficult to say if the efforts of both public and private sector developers are making any impact on the deficit, adding that many houses have been lost to both man-made and natural disasters such as demolitions, fire and flooding incidents, yet there are no records of such incidents.

Onwuanibe reasoned that whatever is not being counted does not count, noting that people can set many goals but the moment they start measuring and tracking them, there is a different level of attention and priority given to those goals.

Onwuanibe, whose company is developing a 28-floor residential building known as Landmark Waterview Apartments, stressed that Nigeria has a data problem, recalling, “In 2022, Nigeria ranked 60th in the Global Real Estate Transparency Index which is an index released by Jones Lang LaSale (JLL) and Lasalle Investment Management that tracks the availability, accessibility, and quality of different real estate metrics.”