Trust, Confidence Are Attributes Credited To Our Giant Strides Over The Years- Adekunle Abdul, MD Abdul Metro Group Reveals

…….As firm targets 500 homes in 5years

The Managing Director of one of the most talked about and reliable real estate firms in Nigeria at the moment, Abdul Metro Group, Dr Adekunle Abdul, has emphasized that the giant strides gained in the last years by the company can be fully attributed to the trust they have built with their investors and customers alike in business transactions.

Some of the excerpts are below:

ON METRO AND CASTLE EVOLEMENT

We are primarily a community development company. We build communities. We do everything that a community needs to function effectively.

From sports outlets to retail outlets to residential construction to facilities management. Whatever you can think of that a community needs to survive, we do.

So, like I said, our message has been very consistent over the years, the first five years of 300 housing units has been the slogan for all these years.

But at that time, we delivered 240 units because of COVID. We had a delay during COVID in 2020. We had some shortfall.

So, out of 300, we were able to deliver 240 between 2019 to 2024, and from this year, 2025 to 2030, our next five-year projection, we are anticipating delivering 500 housing units.

We have already started. 10% of the new housing projection has been delivered.

As I speak, we are moving on. So, we have about 450 housing units to go. We’ve expanded our scope beyond this current community to others not far from here.

We also do retail, which is supermarket outlets for the community to benefit from. In our current community, we’ve established three of those retail outlets, one warehouse, and a bakery.

And we believe that is more than enough to serve the community that we have now.

This is the reason why we are expanding our community now. We are moving out of this environment to start developing more areas.

We are about to start the sports center for the community next month. The land is just behind us here; we have about 8,000 square meters of land. We are about to start the community.

We are going to have a football pitch, a basketball pitch. We are also going to have lawn tennis and real tracks. We are going to have a small recreational area. There are a few things in addition.

This is also to serve the community that we built in. We had one recreational centre before, but it was too small. It was just a football pitch. We called it a mid-size arena.

But we put it down after two years, because we couldn’t continue. That’s why, from 1,200 square meters, we are now moving to 8,000 square meters of capacity.

Like I said, we are about to start that next month. It’s a dream we are actualizing ⁷I Just right beside us, there is another type of person who is building a hospital, which contributes to⁴ the community as well. We have pharmacies, we have all that stuff.

So, we are getting to our goal of a completed community cycle that we have always wanted. And this is our sixth year here.

So, we are high on that. And thank God, I think we have a very great facility management team on the ground. We’ve grown from a staff of eight to a staff of 148.

Our facility team is doing a great job of maintaining all the rental estates within this community.

So, if you go to the pool, gym, everything is working. So, it’s not rocket science. It’s just the attention to detail that matters.

TRAINING REAL ESTATE PRACTITIONERS

Speaking about realtors generally now, there have been a lot of problems in the country regarding real estate and professionalism. So many people do not follow any rules or regulations.

So, what we noticed, and this is just part of our way of developing the human capacity in the industry, we want to assist.

The industry has been a place where anybody can look around and call themselves any name. You know, so customers have their realtors.

You know that you have no complete knowledge about, but you parade yourself as one. I have friends who say, Oh, my cousin is a realtor What qualifies your cousin to be a realtor?

And this is why you end up in a land that is an agricultural land. When you look at all the social media accounts, we figure out that the problem is that the agents and the realtors, too, are not well-equipped knowledge-wise.

And the most advanced case is that you can’t call yourself a realtor. It’s not possible.

That’s insatisfying. You must do exams. You must have the right amount of knowledge.

Because if you do, it’s almost impossible to take someone’s land and buy, you know, an illegitimate property. Because, as a realtor, you must have done some level of due diligence.

But here, I think the realtor are not focused on their commission and the money they are going to make, but on professionalism.

Until this is done, and I think the penalty should be that you have your license seized.

Then you can, you know, you can do your exams, get your license, and so on.

If you are found to be doing any kind of illegal business, your license will be revoked.

That way, people can sit right, you know, and ensure that if they want to stay in a business, they get it right before introducing people to invest their money or not.

So, for those trainings, we are putting our strides together based on our raw knowledge of the streets also bringing in intellectual property personnel.

For instance, Labsca marks a building; all the markings have different meanings, many of which these realtors do not know.

As a realtor, if you see a marked building, you should know the meaning., Most of them don’t know the meaning of those applications and legal stakes.

The agencies that cover building and development in Lagos State are more than 15, if I remember correctly.

So, all this information will be disclosed during the training. We hope to have these realtors come in batches so that we can give them tests and equipment.

We want to use the training to contribute our quota to the industry to reduce the amount of scams.

We’re also trying to see if we can help the government on this proposal, so that the training center would be able to do an exam and have certificates issued for realtors to be certified

Before you buy property from a realtor, ask the person if he or she is certified so that your transaction will be professionally driven, so that this fraudulent activity and corruption in our industry will really slow down.

The centre is a 150-capacity hall. Hopefully, we will start later this month or next month

Also, we’re not setting it up for profit, rather as our contribution, but because we will be running on a generator to power the electricity, we may need to charge a little, but we haven’t determined that yet
It’s some kind of a give-back to society.

DESPITE ECONOMIC CHALLENGES, REAL estate is STILL BOOMING

Real estate is now the third sector. According to NDS, it’s the third after trade and agriculture, after oil and gas.

Whether you like it or not housing deficit is still huge. Real estate will always be in business. Also, I think the government is really focusing on these areas.

This government has been very creative, though we are not there yet, but it’s been very promising. The Ministry of Finance’s investment in real estate has brought some sort of hope. The government is creating solutions now, and we hope it is well implemented. The government is opening the single-digit solution, 9.7% solution. Where people can access up to 100 million Naira and buy properties.

We are committed developers, and we also intend to build on that. So, we are engaging them to see how we can partner with them and achieve a national output, if we access the loan

BUILDING TRUST

Part of it is financing; if you don’t have a good proposal for me to repay the loan, it makes the development of real estate very slow. Land issues also affect many developers, particularly those who do not do their due diligence.

For us, I think, the most important thing is to put every transaction under the law. That’s very important to us. All the land that people built on belongs to some families or settlers. The government takes some and leaves the rest for the family. But for me, as a direct builder, we buy land with titles. That is why you do not see Metro and Castle in money or land issues.

We go with land with valid titles only. That is our brand; we try to shy away from these kinds of issues. And unfortunately, our field is so sensitive that it is why people have court cases. Somebody I know, not too long ago, still had issues with the 1.5 billion land he bought; you must differentiate between government land and family land
As I speak, over two years now, the case doesn’t have a head.

These are the issues that we face on a daily basis that cause chaos for some practitioners.. What I would advise people who want to survive in the real estate business is to avoid those kinds of properties at any stage of their career. It’s the easiest way to go.

So, try as much as possible to do your due diligence, dig deep, like I always say in my training, there’s a difference between search and real search. If you want to search for a property and you pay $10,000 or $50,000, but when you pay a lawyer $500,000, he’s going to dig deeper and bring out the original title. That would enable you to cross-check facts to know the real truth about the property. A lawyer, who doesn’t have that information, may never achieve that extent; that’s the difference, so I think for us, due diligence is very important.

There’s the government master plan, which is one of the problems that you are seeing when people build on drainage areas. Those are the faults of the developers. There’s something along the line that ain’t discovered in the planning, because if you’re charting land, and it’s on that legacy, it will show you that it’s a drainage.

When you go there, it looks like a bush. It looks like land. But the day you go for approval, they will tell you you cannot build on the land.. Those buildings that are built on drainage don’t have government approval. I can guarantee you that.

Because if they did, they would find out that the place is on a government drain, or it’s on a government road, or something with government interest.

So, the government’s interest overrides. They have an overriding interest. It means that compulsory acquisition can be carried out by the government. That is why it is good to have your title. Only if you own the land and you have a title, when they move you out, they must pay you compensation.

MAPPING OUT 176 ESTATES BY LAGOS STATE

People mistake what Lagos State released to mean that the estates are bad. They are not bad. What governments are saying is, they acknowledge that they sold this land to these people; however, they want to know how the land is mapped out internally. Because you need a town planner to come in and plan the structure. The government is saying we are not going to leave the planning of our estates to individuals.

Governments are not going to trust anybody to assume that they know what they are doing. It’s all an assumption. So, there are people called town planners.

They are the ones who plan it for you. put petrol station, police station, all the things that should be inside estates. Even a percentage of that land goes for recreation.

You can’t just build residential on everything. So, I’m not sure of the numbers, but I think that something around 10,000 square meters would require layout approval, which town planners will approve

How will the drainage system in very large estates of 2,000 blocks look like? If there’s no town planning, how do you link your drainage to the State’s waterways? If the government doesn’t plan, the government will be embarrassed by serious flooding. The water must be channeled to the river.

But what these developers do is, when they acquire this land, most of them start selling without getting approval. Or they may have submitted their approval and not gotten any feedback, and they’re just out of their rush to recover their money and start selling.

When you think of the cycle truly. Developers borrow money, and interest is accruing. However, it’s not a reason to break the law. It doesn’t mean that the estates are bad or the land is bad. It’s like the government just says, Come and get your layout approved.

WHY METRO AND CASTLE ARE EVOLVING

So the truth is, we are particular about our brand here; our target market is mixed. So we have a lot of diasporans, international investors, and a lot of Nigerian investors.

We understand that the majority of the masses are probably of the lower class because of the economy

The patronage has been good; I want to believe it is due to our professionalism in handling our construction as well as our relationship with our investors.

We in Metro have decided that brand reputation should be one of our top priorities, that’s why, since we started, we have never been to court before.

We’ve sold hundreds of properties. We’ve never been sued. And the reason is that we know almost everything that it takes.

It’s not out of place for somebody to complain about any key issue, but we handle it well, and they will be satisfied. If you are a developer and you promise to deliver, and they don’t get it, the trust will be broken. Trust is very important.

We never gave up our facility management to any company. Different companies have written proposals for us to help us manage. We didn’t give it up because the experience people start having, if it starts going bad, the brand starts getting a bad image.

We try to protect the integrity of our brand. because I think the trend is that people collect money from investors, and they don’t get their houses on time. Every year, we have a certain number of houses that we must deliver.

Our strategy is that once we roof, it’s then we start selling, and once you start paying, we just start finishing it for you.

So for us, all the realtors are very friendly with us because they know that if you buy a metro, you get your house.

And like I said, the initiatives by this current administration have been encouraging,
having to assist developers with funding. That has been one of our biggest problems. Going to banks and getting money at very high interest rates.

Which in turn makes the houses very expensive. Because they’re not expensive in a real sense

Now they are coming at us and saying, Come, if you have done well and you have a concept that we can identify with or research, we can give you single digits. That is a major cost to the mechanism for us.

Which in turn impacts the buyer to reduce the cost of the housing market. Also, I think that concept helps with job creation. When there’s money to build, it requires a lot of labor.

So as I am, I can do more than what I’m doing. But the funding is a trigger for us, an issue for us.

Directly, we employed over 148 staff with over 300 contractual staff.

So, imagine all these guys benefitting along with their families, you can imagine if we have more funding and how it will transform families

Also, think about the factories that are producing. So for Metro now, a lot of things we use are made in Nigeria.

Only electronics that we import, like ovens and gas. Talk about the taps, doors are made here.

Everything we use is made here. So we try to patronize our home. Once we know that your brand is very good, we go for it.

Because we know that once we patronize you, your spouse, employees will benefit as well as your family. So the train goes round. Everybody starts becoming employed gradually.

What I’m saying is the idea behind plans of the government to make funding available via single digits is fantastic. I can see through that idea; executing the idea is another problem. So the efficiency of how it will be executed is what we are looking at

TIPS TO WATCH OUT FOR IN ACQUIRING LAND/PROPERTY

So, like I mentioned before, legal backing is very important to acquire a landed property as a developer. If you build on a troubled land, government land, or drain, you will blame yourself for not doing due diligence. Because you may eventually lose the land and building, the money is also gone. So I think you should take lawyers more seriously

When you are going to negotiate a property in millions, and there’s no lawyer there, you have exposed yourself to all kinds of issues.. There are too many avenues they can hit you from. Once your lawyer tells you it’s not for residential, you should avoid it.

The government may have allocated that land for something else.

BUILDING FOR THE LOW-INCOME EARNERS

I will say land is the driving factor; if the government provides cheaper land, properties will be cheaper as well. What we construct here in Ajah is the same they do at Lekki, but just that the land there, which costs 400 million, costs 100 million here. I hope you understand the difference. The prices are different despite that we use the same block and cement.

So, for affordable housing, if the government can give us more land at a cheaper rate, it will reduce the cost for low-income earners. Because we have a good structure of payment for people who are of low income already.

The new initiative of the government is what we hope will be accessible to us and buyers as well. It is for the developers and the buyers, it’s for both, the cycle is complete.

Achieving this dream is tough, but we are undaunted. Our dream is to have Metros in every state and as a key business leader in the real estate industry.

We indeed have a good team to achieve this, and I as a person hope to be counted as one of the people who solve the housing problems in this country. I want to integratethe  real estate business and correct the anomalies that have bedeviled the industry.