PH now the hottest real estate destination, says Mayor of housing ahead BD Property Summit in Garden City

…Says summit in Port Harcourt is essential to him

All eyes seem to rove to fish out who are the top real estate gurus that may bring fire and excitement to the first South-South/South East BusinessDay Real Estate Exhibition/Investment Summit which holds few days ahead in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital, regarded as headquarters of the Niger Delta region.

The inclusion of Mayor of Housing, My-ACE China, as one of the top investors on display seems to excite the public. Also announced is Bukola Oshobukola, the MD/CEO of Odibola Properties Ltd, and Onyekachi Nzekwesi, CEO, Pine Leaf Estate & Property Company. The keynote speech would be rendered by Mustapha Njie, the Group MD of TAF Africa Global, who is the MD of Greater TAF Nigeria Ltd.

Gov Sim Fubara is to be the distinguished special guest of honour and chief host who would show the world that Rivers State is back to business with ease of doing business and one-stop-centre (OSC) provisions. Musa Dangiwa, an architect and minister of Housing and Urban Development, would be special guest of honour.

Patrick Ijegbai, BusinesDay’s Business Development GM, is said to have put finishing touches at the prestigious Hotel Presidential in Port Harcourt to make the day a huge success.

Ahead of the event, the Mayor of Housing has tried to put the summit in rare perspective, explaining why he chose to participate soon after participating in same event at BusinessDay’s headquarters a month earlier in Lagos.

Mayor of Housing:

I see this as an international exposé; an international exposé because if you come into Nigeria and Africa, some of the top leading real estate destinations in Africa are Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya (especially Nairobi), and Kigali in Rwanda. And in Nigeria leading these other countries by almost an exponent of 10, the major real estate hubs that have been hitherto known to the rest of the world are Lagos and Abuja. But the projections for property value appreciation for 2026 keep Lagos at 15%, Abuja at 20%, but Port Harcourt at 30%.

PH has more real estate potential than Lagos and Abuja

Those that understand real estate know that Port Harcourt has more untapped real estate potential, more greenery, more landscape, more real estate value than Lagos and Abuja. And it becomes the hottest destination not only for real estate investment but for other investment because hitherto, Port Harcourt was the garden city in the ’70s and ’80s but lost that and became a locked investment haven where nothing was happening. But recently, that lock has been removed by the Sim Fubara administration and the setting up of the Rivers State Investment Promotion Agency (RSIPA), which came out of the last Rivers State Economic and Investment Summit.

Administratively, Rivers State has been opened and is now ready for business. So, what BD, the biggest business newspaper in Africa, is doing is unveiling the hitherto hidden secret that people like us have taken advantage of and that those that heed to that exposé and come in while it’s still green and early will not only hit their best investment for their lifetime but will take the best returns on the green advantage of coming early. And this is not just me postulating. One of the best beach and lifestyle resort brands in Africa now, the Landmark group, has just sealed a deal to step into Port Harcourt in a just unveiled ahead of this conference in a partnership of the Tourist Beach in PH that they will be developing.

So the blue economy in Rivers State, which is more intricate, more deep, and more untapped than the blue economy of Lagos, is about to be unveiled and the inter-twinning inter-marriage between the blue economy and the green lush sceneries of the very watered, very green landscape of Rivers State for real estate is about to be unlocked.

So the value appreciation for the next six or seven years of Port Harcourt will always be at almost double that of Lagos and Abuja because those cities are approaching saturation while PH is just starting.

Unlike myopic business people, I’m the Mayor of Housing because I’m the most collaborative businessman alive in Africa. And I’ve learned the Metcalfe’s law of networking that the value of a network is equal to n^2, where n is the number of nodes in that network. So the number of people that are participating in a market increases the value of the market squared. So if two people are participating in the market, the strength of the market is 2^2, which is 4. But if two more people join them, which has doubled, it becomes 4^2, which is 16. 16 is four times of 4, while 4 is twice of 2. So the more credible participants participate in the market, the more exponential the value of the market. And that’s why you notice places such as the Alaba International Market, GSM Market, or the Ariaria Market, if you are not there, you don’t get value because the more participants join the market, the more the value of the market.

So I have come and taken root in Rivers State. Right now, my next obsession is to make sure more credible participants like the Landmark Group come in. And the more they come, the more the value of the market exponentially multiplies and the more the returns on my investment in the location.

The Alesa project:

ALESA is an acronym for an Advanced Living Environment for Sustainable Advantage. It is the first in the series of sustainable green smart cities we’re building across Africa. But more than that, we had to get a meaning to the aboriginal name: the host community to our project is also called Alesa. So it took a lot of brain for us to get a meaning to the community name for our project name. So I have a quote that says, “The only asset greater than real estate in the all asset class is the brain,” and in the Mayor of Housing, we have the two. So ALESA is a showcasing of both the brain and the property Midas’ eyes of the Mayor of Housing because we know where all the properties that are gold are, and one of them is Alesa Island. It’s our pioneer gold standard of development. What is the gold standard? Development without environmental health is not development. Something has happened in Africa where we are creating concrete but hazardous environments and call them luxury environments.

The word luxury must go with wealth and health. If any is not there, it’s not full luxury. So we are going for a green, low-density development that is a modern renaissance or modern contemporary of the Shell era and LNG era. There is space, there’s greenery, there’s no pollution, and it’s going to be the first zero-emissions estate because we’re using sustainable power with green power that is healthy. So it will be a zero-emissions estate, and we’re targeting to have a United Nations green habitat status. We want to create an environment that even expatriates will be jealous of, that they can’t find such things even in their own locations.

We’re not targeting to create the diaspora in Nigeria; we’re targeting to create something better. So it will be a green smart sustainable city. And the sustainability has to also do with economic sustainability. And to prove that, it will be the first estate in Nigeria that has power cheaper than public power supply (popularly known as NEPA power). It will be the first estate in Nigeria that does not ask for service charge, yet offers higher maintenance services than the ones that collect service charge. It will be the first of its kind. The crown on the jewel of the Garden City is Alesa Highlands. And that series will be duplicated across Nigeria and Africa when we finish it. This is because we have three genres or three series of housing development. The top, top luxury is ALESA; we have the luxury (the regular luxury), which will be launched soon. And then, we have the lower tier luxury, the low-cost housing luxury, which will be launched soon. Because of how much Rivers State has welcomed investors and how much Rivers State has made doing business easy for business owners through the Fubara administration, and especially the Rivers State Investment Promotion Agency, we intend to launch all those three series of housing solutions starting from Rivers State.

BDay, the best business trumpeter in Africa:

My expectation at this summit is simply one thing: beyond the summit. I expect that Rivers State has been a hidden gem and a hidden secret. And one of the best things that can make a place loud is when laudable projects are lauded. And one of the best business trumpeters I know in Africa is BusinessDay. So beyond our beautiful exhibitions for the day of the summit, I expect a post-summit lauding, a post-summit trumpeting, a post-summit singing of the beauty of this location; loud and wide enough for the whole globe to hear it.

Let it be like a ripple that on that day of the event is the middle of the drop of the stone in the water. Let the ripple reverberate across all the water that it will get to the edges of the world no matter how far and wide. If this summit only ends on that day and news about it, discussions about it, post-issues about it end on that day, I’ll be highly disappointed. I expect that ripple to continue, that the reverberations of the vibration that will be laid down on that day will last for another one year and will reverberate across the globe, creating curiosity that people will want to say, “Can anything good come out of Rivers State? Let’s come and see.”

And that coming to see will lead them to this Midas location of green, lush, valuable real estate called the Garden City. It has only been the Oil City in the last two decades. Now we are returning the garden back to the city, and we expect the whole world to hear about it.

RSG must seize the moment for land process digitization:

Yes, the other thing I want to say is this: at the back of all this, every summit, every discussion on real estate must talk about digitization and organization of real estate cataloging and our land use laws.

The government must also take advantage of this opportunity to address the problem of land cataloging, land sales, and land administration. End to land grabbing should come.

Rivers State is ripe for digitization of our land assets and land acquisition processes. The government of His Excellency has already championed that in the Greater Port Harcourt. But I would add that with observation the market is ripe, the world is ripe, the environment is ripe. If they can expand that digitization process to the whole of Rivers State, then they will exclude every possibility for land grabbing and land fraud.

The moment you make this garden a safe garden for land transactions, I assure the state that the revenue and the economy that would rush into Rivers State will shock them. Rivers State has a waiting but surging crowd of investors only looking for one thing: the safety of their investment. And sanitizing the investment and land acquisition and land cataloging and land use processes will boost their confidence and they’ll come rushing in. And when they come rushing in, where capital goes, economy goes; where economy goes, welfare goes; where welfare goes, happiness goes; where happiness goes, more productivity comes up. And the things that happened in Dubai can now happen in Port Harcourt. Dubai had no green natural blue economy like Port Harcourt has, they didn’t have natural riverine economy like a Port Harcourt, they didn’t have natural green lush environment like Port Harcourt, but they created it artificially and lured the world to make Dubai the real estate playground and capital of the world; and the economy of Dubai exploded. If the government can take a cue and prepare the ground very well, Port Harcourt will be the next Dubai.