By Yemisi Izuora/Ijeoma Agudosi
Mutual Benefits today commissioned the ‘Muatual Alpha Courts’ an impressive residential estate located in Lagos.
The project which commenced three years ago is made up of four bedroom apartments on two floors with additional two bedroom apartment on the ground floor as service quarters or an income generator if leased to a tenant.
Overall, the estate has 18 blocks of 54 units and two blocks of 2 units with easy access to main arterial axis roads to the Island and Ikeja via the Funsho Willaims Avenue/Eko bridge and the Third Mainland bridge.
Speaking at the commissioning ceremony, Group Managing Director (GMD) of Mutual Group Dr. Akin Ognbiyi, said the company decided to venture into real estate to compliment governments effort at providing affordable homes to Nigerians.
Ogunbiyi recalled that recent data put housing gap at 17 million and that combined effort of government and the private sector had failed to assuage the rising housing demand.
Furthermore, the GMD, said ‘Urbanisation has made the problem worse because in metropolitan cities like, Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt there is a constant pull of people to the city centres’.
Prohibitive costs of providing suitable houses have also exacerbated the problem’.
He also recalled that the Coordinating Minister-In-Charge of finance and economic development, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala recetly explained that the launching of the first 60,000 mortgages to signpost the commencement of the presidential initiative for the delivery of houses under the Nigeria Mortgage Rfinancing Company (NMRC) was meant to address the limitation by banks to deliver mortgage services.
Ogunbiyifurther stated that at the recent insurance summit the minister also charged the insurance industry to support governments initiative to bridge the housing gap.
He therefore said that the company was prompted to invest in the sector so as to nsupport the initiative and help Nigerians own affordable but habitable homes