As part of its efforts to ensure that residents are charged according to their earnings, the Lagos State Government has disclosed plans to enforce the monthly rental scheme of the state to reduce financial burdens on the tenants. Barakat Odunuga-Bakare, Special Adviser to Lagos State Governor on Housing, said that the state’s monthly rental scheme will be enforced before the end of 2024, or early next year, 2025, while briefing the media, recently at a conference organised by the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority in Ikeja, Lagos.
Odunuga-Bakare said as it is obtainable in other climes, rents are collected monthly, adding that the state is looking and hoping that before the end of the year, or early next year, it will be able to implement the policy on monthly rental, which would be charged according to tenants’ earnings. According to her, “The good part about it is that we would be test-running it first within the public sector, since we can ascertain how much everybody is earning, and once we see that it works in the public sector, we can now push it out to the private sector.”
Stating that the fact that the scheme was slow to take off showed that the Lagos State Government was still trying to perfect some things, as she added that the N5bn allocated for the monthly rental scheme was still set aside and untouched. She said, “The last administration that initiated the monthly rental scheme was coming to an end when the scheme was to be introduced. Now, we have a new administration and the governor wants the scheme to come into effect by the end of this year, or early next year.”
Meanwhile, in 2021, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Lagos State Governor, had said the current rental model in which people pay yearly rent in advance to property owners has become inadequate to address contemporary realities in the housing sector, especially in cities where demand for property is high and expensive. The governor advocated a monthly rental system, which he said would be affordable to low- and middle-income earners, pressured by the yearly rent obligation at the 10th meeting of the National Council on Land held in Lagos. He urged policymakers to consider the suggestion and initiate a regulatory framework that would aid the transition to a new rental system.