A corporate real estate marketing and consulting firm, M.I. Okoro and Associates, and Polaris Bank have entered into a partnership agreement to facilitate the relocation of over 2000 members of electrical materials dealers association, presently in Okija, Port Harcourt, to their permanent site.
Polaris Bank will provide a N5-billion mortgage financing opportunity to enable buyers to get seamless payment while doing their business.
The new site called the ‘Promise Land’, according to the firm, is located at Iriebe, KM 17, Aba-Port Harcourt Road in Rivers State. It will enable the dealers to settle down fully for business while contributing to the growth and internally generated revenue (IGR) of the state.
Meckson Okoro, principal partner, M.I. Okoro and Associates, said that 600 shops, where businesses could commence instantly, had been developed out of 1,729 lockup shops that were in progress.
“The traders will be privileged to have massive warehouses where their goods will be kept for easy distribution to their various customers while their visiting customers would load and offload goods within the warehouses and transport same to different parts of Nigeria.
Okoro said there would be a restaurant located at various convenient points within the market city to enable traders to save time as well as other important facilities including electricity supply which is a combination of solar and independent energy supply.
The 14.3 square meters lock-up shops developed on ground and first floor will be sold at a promotion price of N4.5 million for the ground floor, while the first floor will cost 4 Million. These prices will go higher after the end of April.
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However, Polaris Bank stated that it’s a deliberate policy to support small and medium scale business to survive in Nigeria that informed their decision to partner with the firm to provide mortgage funding to interested buyers.
Okoro said that the traders’ movement to the new site will unlock the latent value for all land and properties in and around the immediate environment of the market city while bringing an increase in capital and rental value.
“This will generate increase in demand for complementary land uses which will make the land and property owners in the neighbourhood experience high demand for their properties which will translate to more income to their pockets because demand will be more than supply of the existing real estate in the neighbourhood,” Okoro said.
For the government, he said, the movement to the new site will improve the general economic well- being of the residents of the area and the Rivers State government will make more money from tax.
According to him, “by implication, therefore, the Rivers State government will make more money by way of taxing the income of business people around the area and their property too. So, at the end of the day, everyone will benefit from the relocation.”
