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In line with its mandate to making rent and house ownership affordable and accessible to Nigerians, a real estate firm, Rentsmallsmall, has renewed its commitment to a flexible payment plan for teeming tenants in the country. Addressing a cross section of journalists, recently, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of the firm, Tunde Balogun, enumerated the litany of challenges tenants of residential and business complexes go through in metropolitan Lagos. According to him, statistically, over 15 million people live in rented apartments in Lagos, a state which has one of the highest rent-to-income rates in the world.
Describing the anomaly as an aberration, Balogun opined that his company has set out to provide affordable and easily accessible houses for Nigerians with a flexible payment plan for the rent, a scheme he succinctly describes as a deviation from the current practice where house owners demand a one-year or even a two-year rent. “We have developed this platform to give Nigerians especially the young professionals the ability to pay their rents flexibly, as against paying upfront.
“And Lagos has one of the highest rent-to-income rates in the world. From our research, cities like New York and Hong Kong, collect up to 59 to 60 percent. People pay their income to their rent. Lagos is around that as well. This is common on the Island because everybody has just kind of settled in but things are not supposed to be like that,” Balogun said.
Miffed at the agency and legal fees often charged on rents, Balogun said that his company will eradicate such charges, as such is not obtainable in most parts of the developed and developing world.
“With Rentsmallsmall, there is no agency, no legal fee. What we do is to get the base rent from the landlord. We mark it up by certain percentage which still makes sense at the end of the year because by the time you add the agency and the legal fee to the base rent, and mark it up to the base rent, you will find out that Rentsmallsmall still gives advantage”. He pointed out that the scheme, by and large, is also advantageous to landlords who may see it as a demerit. He added that the company also provides an insurance scheme to cover for the fears and any impending loss to landlords.
