Ayo Olanrewaju Kuyebi, CEO of GMH Luxury, tells Bennett Oghifo that the government wants to regulate the lending and real estate sectors for sustainable housing in Nigeria. The builder and allocation control representative for many years discusses similar issues to the housing subsector. of the national economy and shares his attitude on his transition from worker to builder of a thriving real estate company with major assignments located in Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki. , Gbagada and among others. It also offers an opinion on the highest rate of construction landslides in Nigeria, and calls on Nigerians to prevent the construction of water canals.
The poor lending formula remains a barrier to homeownership in Nigeria. What’s the matter?
Nigeria’s poor lending formula has long been a barrier to widespread homeownership and effective homeownership and housing programs. High interest rates, limited access to affordable loans and a variety of demanding situations have thwarted the aspirations of many Nigerians to become homeowners. To solve these problems and make homeownership a reality for a broader portion of the population, a comprehensive approach is needed. To improve the lending formula in Nigeria, the government can work with financial institutions to offer more affordable lending rates. They can create housing budgets or grants to help low-income people make their down payments. Implement credit rating formulas to evaluate, as it should, the solvency of borrowers. They can also reduce bureaucracy and streamline the loan application process; inspire the participation of the personal sector in the loan market. The government can strengthen regulations governing the lending and real estate industries. This includes creating legal safeguards, achieving greater transparency and ensuring that seizure processes are transparent and efficient.
How can you get a job in the real estate industry?
This is achieved by giving a wonderful importance to enjoyment. As you know, there is a popular saying that the goal of your education will determine the goal of your reign. In 2006, I was offered to work at a bank as a teller, but I declined the offer. Instead, I joined an engineering company for educational purposes, where I had no salary, but I left a job where I was supposedly paid over 200,000 naira at the time. Array For me, it’s all about enjoyment, because I knew exactly what I was looking for to achieve my goals. . It’s about enjoying. To be the most productive, you must be made up of the best. When I was a young engineer, all I wanted was to be one of the most productive in the industry and that is my driving force. To be honest, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon, so I have to survive. I’ve been teaching myself this since I was 9 years old: how to survive. What I did aside was that in the company I was running at the time, they were teaching me about design, and there was a tutorial near the office, so in the afternoon, when I close at five in the afternoon, I’ll go to the one they taught me how to do. to do two hours for which they paid me 150 naira per hour and with that I supported myself, in addition to the little coins I earned at home. So after seven months, I was given a salary of N15,000 and I worked in the company for two years. Later I abandon my task. I went to work for another company, it’s an organization of companies because I went from working with one guy to an organization of companies where they have a little bit of design. I just need to figure out how design works, because where I come from, we’re an accountant, a design clerk, a shopkeeper. I need to work in a company where we have site engineers, others and make sure I stay there and understand how a grassroots organization works, looking at org charts and all that. I worked in the company for three years and to my surprise, when I was interviewed for the position, I was given a salary of N32,000 per week and I went from being a site engineer to deputy task manager. I was coordinating 3 assignments at a time, one each in Ilaje Bariga, Makoko and Agunlejika in Lapasss Cele domain and traveling between all those sites one and both one day. On those sites, they built other designs at that time. So after working in a company for about a year and a half, I also wanted to enjoy what it feels like to work in a multinational company. I looked for more roles and also wanted to see what a multinational company was like; What is it like to work in a multinational company? So I implemented and like at the time I was applying, the position available was a trainee engineer. So I accepted the offer, but it was a big pay cut for me, but I enjoy the efficiency and specialization at the top of working with an organization like that. And in 2010 I left the position to create a company called Geostruct konsult Limited, specializing in pile painting. The reason I need to work in the design industry is the fact that other people rarely get a price for coins in this industry, most people burn their fingers, you promise this A and you deliver Z. As in Those days Array pilling was very complicated. The other people doing it at that time did not have the technical prerequisites to adopt such allocations and the failure rate of foundations at that time was alarming and I took it upon myself to venture into the accumulation, promising to do so. anything else and make sure that both visitors get the price of the coins. In 2010, the small coins I collected amounted to about 70,000 naf. I used it to start a company called Jostrut Consult Limited. I invested the coins in making what they call an oscillating platform. This is a smaller pill ring made locally and when I made it I called other people; We call the experts surveyors and they have many years of experience like me, so we formed a partnership for this task. In 2014, Jostrut Consult became a company with over $5 million worth of gadgets and coins in the bank.
In 2023, how can we harness productivity with skill and the right attitude, considering the existing young people and the number of graduates we currently have, where the maximum of them work for free?It’s everything you said about professional development, is it still applicable?Today’s young people?
The challenge is that some people have talents with intelligent attitudes while others have intelligent attitudes without talents. This is a big challenge for employers. Are even graduates who undergo training every year employable? They still have to be remotely guided to perform their duties. I think it’s our culture now, our intellectual laziness and our feeling of having each and every thing that is ours. When I was young, by the nature of my origin, I did not expect anything from anyone, nothing that I could not achieve on my own, I faced music. I know what it takes to climb this pedestal, everything I have to achieve, I have to earn it and embark on what is called personal progression, I have worked on several pro bono projects (for free) because the first thing is to create price. So now I can tell you what I’m going to take. Most of the time you will be fooled, but one thing stands out: the delight you gained during the procedure cannot be taken away from you. I painted freely in various places, not only in Alimosho, but also in Banana Island. If you want to give me work in Alimosho and Banana Island, I will consider racing in Banana Island, even if they don’t pay me, because of the exposure and experience I will gain there. For me, delayed gratification is an opportunity to indulge because the quality of fabrics you will be exposed to when you paint in Lekki is not the same as when you paint in Alimosho or when you paint somewhere in Ogun State. Let me tell you that after turning down the position of teller at a bank, I was tasked with building bungalows. I said that’s not what I was looking for, what I was looking for was to have the pleasure of being able to build towers, to be able to build 7-story buildings, and to know when to call this or that professional. site at the scheduled time. I have dreamed of offering shelter, giving other people price for money. I can tell you that we are the first progression company in Lagos to own an apartment building on the mainland in Gbagada and we sold it, despite all the feasibility studies.
Real estate is a risk, how do other people, especially those with low incomes, react?
Self-improvement and urgency are created through the laxity resulting from laziness. I need to move on to Ajah and I’m in Agege, and I faced Abeokuta, how will I end up in Ajah? Whatever you need to do, it will have to come with a plan and a step, you will have to outline your steps. Most of my peers who entered the banking sector lost their jobs in 2008 when there was a crisis in the sector, with no basis to fall back on after two years. They were paid well for those two years, but they left with no experience. I have a plan and a step, that’s why I left banking for real estate. I am very frugal when it comes to cash management, I have a portfolio of over 30 billion naira, you can’t see me with any companion, not that I can’t do it, but this is not a priority. Everything I have to do, I have to set a time and a schedule. If you have an income stream of N90,000 and you dream of one day owning a building, what do you do with your N90,000 and what price do you charge? They are asking for a 5,000 naira seminar that cannot be finished, they are asking for a monetary freedom seminar that cannot be finished. How much do you invest in a non-public progression because of an intellectual symbol of what you don’t have in mind? you will never be able to live there. It starts with the mindset. When I was born GMH Luxury, I was in a place in Ilaje Bariga, at that time I didn’t even have 300,000 naira in savings and I wrote that until 2014, I would start my own progression, even if I could I didn’t start in 2014, I started in 2015 by purchasing land for a price tag of over 40 million naira. So how did I handle ripassr? It is an intellectuality of service, an intellectuality of offering the right service; When you have that intellectuality, money will chase you. I’ve never seen anyone chasing money and making money, but when you’re looking for great service, money comes naturally to you. What I did differently when I started my own company is that if you call me to talk, what I will do is tell you how to perform a software audit on your assignment site. I will explain to you what you should pay attention to, when you get to the site I will give you an estimate of the charge for this and I will give you all the data you need, even as a layman, so that you know.
With the number of structure collapses in Lagos and Nigeria, developer infiltration, and the loss of building materials, you’ve managed to stand out, what’s your secret?
I’ll tell you this: have I ever failed? I will say yes, because failure inspires winners and deceives losers. During the development of my career, I suffered a fatal failure in which I lost a lot of money; In Mapassdo I had to demolish 11 complexes of semi-detached houses due to the works on the Grand Canal, the direction of the canal was blocked. If you know Mapassdo and the Mapassdo streams, what separates them is a canal, some said it was land and they blocked the canal and our order was at reception. Since I know the force of nature and the custom of water, we had the option of demolishing the structure or ensuring the maintenance of the canal. And since we do not have control of the canal, we demolish the structures; In the process, we lost about N370 million. We lost cash, but none of our investors lost cash because we moved some of it and paid off some of it. The fact hurts, but we are not going to present a task that will not stand the test of time. We will not pass up an order that would not last, we prefer to cancel it. And in our 8 years in business, we have had to cancel two assignments due to environmental and base failures. These are the reasons why we see incessant collapses of structures because they look to fix them and fix them; No one will give you what they don’t have. And when it comes to structural collapses, if you look at recent collapses, they follow the same pattern. Gone are the days when houses collapsed only in the rainy season. Today we are witnessing the collapse of multistructural housing. It is the climax of the admitted charlatans in the structural career that causes the collapse: an accountant needs to become an engineer.
As it turns out, it built trust. Was it worth it? Some would have sold the idea of tearing it down.
Trust has brought us this far and it has paid off. How can you go from 570,000 naira in 2010 to a portfolio of more than 30,000 million naira in thirteen years?This can only be achieved with impeccable acceptance and reputation. It has to be based on empathy. For example, in 2020 I started a project; Then came COVID-19, the devaluation of the naira, and then inflation. When I was done, I went back to the subscribers. I told them there was no way that what they had paid before would finish this project, so I added a safe percentage based on economic realities and they paid, because we didn’t skimp on shortcuts.
The money laundering factor is related to real estate and tells us about the housing deficit in Nigeria. What is the future?
The fight against corruption and money laundering through real estate is a complex system. What we do is make sure we get the cash through the right channels. If you need to sign up for our project, you will have to pay legally and transparently. With us there are legal means of payment, we will not worry later. As far as the housing deficit is concerned, the hole is huge, we have noticed what India has been able to do between 2017 and 2022. They have managed to supply more than 17 million housing complexes and how they are doing there, by providing loans subsidized to its citizens. The same was done in Brazil in 2009 and the same was done in South Africa. How can real estate be reasonable when the facility offered to promoters, even personal investors, is 30% and can it be reasonable when the approval rate increases? We are also seeing a huge devaluation of the Naira and 90% of fabrics for the real estate sector are imported. And the current dollar exchange rate is nothing extraordinary. So this is an area that the government literally wants to pay attention to. The available infrastructure is overloaded, so the government will have to create new cities and take into account the population, since there is no provision for population expansion.
Land titling and land grabbing persist unabated in Lagos State and other parts of the country. What recommendation do you have for the government in this regard?
To deal with land titling disorders and land grabbing, the government could possibly do the following: The government wants to simplify land registration, streamline the land registration procedure to make it more effective and available to the public. They deserve to use generation to create and maintain a virtual database of land records to lessen the threat of land disputes. The other step is land regularization: the government wants to regularize land ownership, especially in informal settlements, so that it can provide legal land titles. to the residents. They want to strengthen security, improve the security of land registries, and step up law enforcement efforts to prevent land grabbing.
The Lagos State Government has introduced a rent-to-own initiative to make housing available to many Nigerians. Are you also thinking in this direction in some of your GMH luxury housing programs?
Rent-to-own projects can be favorable for increasing housing affordability. They allow Americans to gradually gain an asset while living there. Whether it’s a smart solution or not depends on the specific main points and implementation. Such projects can help the average and low-income people, as long as they are well-designed and transparent. As smart as this initiative is, GMH is not contemplating renting it to a landlord at this time.
Are your housing projects aimed at very wealthy, middle-class, or low-income people and where are they located?
GMH Luxury caters to the middle class and the very wealthy. We offer other payment plans to accommodate other monetary functions and our homes are strategically located in spaces that cater to those demographics. We have houses on the island in Lekki and Ikoyi. We also have houses on the mainland, in Gbagada. This technique reflects our commitment to serving a diverse income source team with varied housing options.
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