Dataphyte’s Advisory Note ‘Nigerian Post-oil Economy: Going the Housing Consumer Credit Path’, sheds much-needed light on Nigeria’s housing deficit and the potentials it holds. It has been revealed in the report that about 26 million households in Nigeria do not own their homes.
The report further says that the homeownership problem is more prevalent in the SouthWest and South-South region of Nigeria where the homeownership rate is just 25.5% and 46.2 % respectively. Whereas in the North-Central, North-East and NorthWest it is 69.4 percent, 78.7 percent and 88.1 percent respectively.
“In 2019, there were higher occurrences of home rentals in both the South West (35 %) and South-South (24 %) than in the North East, North West, and North Central”.
The report’s focus is on helping Nigeria achieve better economic development and bridge economic gaps including gaps in the labour sector by tapping into consumer demand-led interventions especially in the housing sector. It explained that the low homeownership rate is not the choice of consumers, rather, the challenges of homeownership centre around affordability and availability.
According to the report, rented homes are also significantly more common in urban areas (36%) than in rural (5 %). Authorized use of homes without charge is also a relatively common occurrence in the South with 26.2 and 16 percent of the sample occupying free authorized homes in the South West and the South-South, respectively. This phenomenon is also more common in the urban areas (17.4 %) than in the rural areas (12.6%).
The report cautioned that with Nigeria’s demographic structure, the problem could become even bigger and the implication on the social sector could be telling. If the rising number of young adults still living with parents is accounted for and they are counted as renters rather than being in a home-owning household, then the ownership rate in Nigeria would be even lower.