Chikwado Ezike, a middle-level civil servant with a family of five, is a Lagos resident living in Ilupeju-one of the middle-income and highly sought-after settlements in the sprawling city-where housing has turned luxury by reason of its price and deficit.
Late last year, precisely in December 2024, Ezike’s landlord notified him of an increase in his house rent, saying that the rent on his three-bedroom apartment is now N1.5 million, up from N850,000 he had been paying in the last three years.
Angered by that mindless increase viz-a-viz his income, Ezike requested his landlord to give him time to get an alternative accommodation and leave. In the last four months he has been moving from one place to another and, to his frustration, none of the places he visited offered anything below what his landlord was demanding.
Only last week, he was ‘lucky’ to get same size apartment within the same neighbourhood for N3 million per annum. “Yes, the rent is N3 million but I had to part with over N4 million because there are other fees, including caution, agency and agreement, I had to pay.
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It has been a nightmare for me and my family these past four months. The pressure from my landlord, through his lawyer, is better left to the imagination. This coupled with frequent demands from children in school; madam and her kitchen, and my siblings, all kept me awake much of the night. And to cap it all, I had to take a loan to pay for the new place because I didn’t have that kind of money anywhere,’ Ezike lamented to this reporter.
Ezike’s case is not an isolated one. Oliver Okechukwu, an Onitsha-based transporter, spoke with a mournful tone on phone when he told this reporter, “I am at home as I talk to you now and I came back with my family. My brother, I don’t even know when we will go back. If we must go back, it has to be only me first.”
Okechukwu explained that his landlord has been all over him, asking for his house rent which he moved from N450,000 per annum to N850,000 for a three-bedroom flat where they started living with N120,000 per annum about eight years ago.
“Where do I find the kind of money my landlord is asking for?” he asked, pointing out that since the problem in exchange rate started and the rising cost of everything, their business has suffered serious setback. My family has to stay here; I will go back to look for something else I can do because we must eat and children have to go to school,” he said.
The economic nightmare which house rent has become for many families in Nigeria is just unfortunate, more so as it cuts across all regions of the country, particularly major cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Ibadan, Onitsha, Kano, among others.
For renters in these cities, these are not the best of times as landlords, buoyed by greed and emboldened by macro-economic pressures, have pushed their house rents up above 100 percent, putting their tenants on edge and leaving them reeling ceaselessly.
As a country, Nigeria has a disquieting housing situation. The World Bank estimates that the country has 20 million housing units deficit which requires the country to build 700,000 housing units annually for the next two decades to close that gap. But the total annual output is put at 100,000 units.
The country’s homeownership level is only 25 percent of its 200 million population and reports have it that about 80 percent of the country’s population lives in rented accommodation. Furthermore, only 5 percent of the country’s housing stock has formal mortgage while mortgage penetration in the country is about 0.5 percent.
Progress in finding solutions to these worrying challenges is very slow because, across many cities, construction activities have slowed due to rising borrowing costs, foreign exchange volatility, rising construction material prices, and lack of infrastructure.
Despite the curious economics that crashed inflation rates from 34.80 percent in December 2024 to 24.48 percent, 23.18 percent and 24.43 percent in January, February and March 2025 respectively, inflationary pressure in terms of market reality remains high and this has affected the prices of building materials, limited home ownership, and increased prices of new homes.
“Market has seen increases in rent for new buildings of up to 50 percent or more depending on location. One bedroom is now about N2.5 million while two bedroom is around N3.5 million, up from N1.8 million and N2.3 million respectively in Lekki axis,” MKO Balogun, CEO of Global PFI, confirmed to our reporter.
Ayo Ibaru, CEO, Northcourt Real Estate, agrees, adding that because prices have gone up, landlords are transferring costs to tenants and that is creating a near-crisis in the market.
The rental crisis in the country is completely indifferent to location which is why the rental market has seen a crisscross movement, showing mid-income tenants moving to areas that are traditionally inhabited by low-income earners who are now pushed farther into the suburbs where there is now an uptick in demand.
In these locations too, rents have gone by over 100 percent as a two-bedroom apartment that was previously renting for between N450,000 and N700,000 now goes for between N1 million and N1.2 million, while a three-bedroom flat that was previously rented for between N800,000 and N1 million is now rented out for between N1.5 million and N2.5 million and above, depending on the age of the house. New houses attract upwards of N3 million per annum.
In Abuja, within the city centre, a four-bedroom detached duplex rents for as high as N15 million, a three-bedroom, N6 million, a newly built two-bedroom apartment goes for between N5 million and N8 million, depending on location and age of the house.
In Port Harcourt, Rivers State, a two-bedroom flat rents for between N2 million and N3.5 million yearly, a three-bedroom flat goes for between N3.5 million and N8 million, while a mini-flat rents for between N500,000 and N600,000, depending on the location.
Though the landlords are smiling to their banks, it is still not easy for many of them as the increases come with consequences. Many of them have a lot to contend with, especially payment default and difficulty in recovering their property from delinquent tenants.
“Rent default is now across board. The high-end market which hitherto had a low level of defaults because of the calibre of tenants there has seen an upsurge in rent default,” Gbenga Olaniyan, CEO of Estate Links Limited, confirmed to our reporter.
He added that default rate is now in the region of 30-40 percent, especially in serviced estates where high energy cost and other maintenance costs have pushed aggregate rent to crazy levels whereas the income of the tenants remains stagnant apparently.
The rent situation in the country is raising enormous concerns, more so as intervention to regulate the rental market through the ‘rent control’ law, is yet to achieve results.
Because of its expanding population and fast-paced urbanization, Lagos has been at the forefront of interventions in its rental market. The state, a couple of years ago, joined forces with the National Assembly to come up with a legislation to control excessive rent hike by landlords across the various states of the federation.
In August 2012, the state government under the former governor, Babatunde Fashola, enacted what it called ‘Lagos Tenancy Law’ which prohibited landlords from collecting rents in advance, arguing that tenants are paid salaries monthly and even in arrears.
The law which is applicable to all premises within Lagos State, including business and residential premises, states that “it shall be unlawful for a landlord or his agent to demand or receive from a sitting tenant rent in excess of three months in respect of any premises.
It also provides that “it shall be unlawful for a sitting tenant to offer or pay rent in excess of three months in respect of any premises, and recommends that “any person who receives or pays rent in excess of what is prescribed in this section shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable to a fine of one hundred thousand naira (N100,000.00) or to three months imprisonment or any other non-custodial disposition.
Recently, the Enugu State government seemed to have followed Lagos footsteps as the state’s house of assembly came up with a ‘Bill for a Law to Amend the Landlord and Tenant Law, CAP. 101, Laws of Enugu State, 2024’, seeking to regulate agency and legal fees, and to abolish caution fee completely.
The bill also seeks to set both fees at a maximum of 10 percent as well as abolish the agelong practice of caution fees demanded of tenants by landlords, but never refunded at the end of their tenancy, insisting that the 10 percent can be negotiated.
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In Lagos, landlords have continued to hike their rents in spite of the law, raising concerns among analysts as to whether the law exists only in principle as it is yet to record its first victim 12 years after.
Sola Enitan, an estate surveyor and valuer, attributes this failure to a number of factors, saying, “you cannot legislate on what you don’t have control over. The properties are not government’s properties. They belong to private developers.”
Enitan, who is also a lawyer, noted that the tenancy law cannot stem rent hikes in Lagos and any other state for that matter, because, according to him, government is not offering any alternative like what obtains in other economies like London and America.
“Government cannot legislate for developers who build their houses with bank credit in which case they would like to recoup their investments in good time to avoid piling pressure and interest on the loan,” he said, adding, “laws will not work where inflation has pushed prices of building materials to the roof top and government doesn’t seem to have solution to that.”
Olayemi Ibikunle, a property manager, agrees, stressing that “for so long as costs continue to rise across board, landlords will continue to push up their house rents and for so long will rents soar and disputes arise between landlords and tenants.”
