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Stories by Maduka Nweke
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Ladipo Lewis, the immediate past Chairman of Nigerian Institute of Architects, Lagos State Chapter, and the Principal Partner of AZDEC A.S.C Design Consultants has seen it all in the architectural environment. A member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), who read Architecture and Planning at the University of Jos, Lewis is widely travelled. In this interview with Daily Sun, he spoke on a range of issues including why Nigeria’s poor are finding it difficult to own properties in the country.
Excerpts:
Property development in Nigeria
Well I believe real estate development in Nigeria is one of the largest industries that employs a huge number of people. It is also the industry that provides us with housing, places to work, schools to attend and provides all kinds of shelter for everybody for economic activity. It should be one of the movers of economic development of the whole of Lagos State and Nigeria. Housing and construction industry is the largest revenue generator in any developing economy and even developed economies of the world. So I believe that opportunity and enabling environment should be given for it to thrive. Countries are identified by the kind of iconic buildings developed by real estate development.
If you look at London today the emblem is the building called the Shad which is the tallest building in the whole of Europe. If you look at Dubai, you see the Burj Khalifa currently the tallest building in the world. So if you look at France, you see the Eiffel Towers as a symbol of that country. So every country in the world, even going back to ancient times, you go to Egypt, you see the pyramid as the symbol of that country. So, world wide, real estate actually is the emblem of status of a country. In Singapore, the new buildings built some years back called the Marina Beesant, the fifty storey building with 62.5 meter cantilever is a hotel, a banquet center, a convention center, a shopping mall, all combined together is now the symbol of Singapore. Even more than the historical Melayon sculpture just across the Singapore Marina bridge used to be the symbol. You can see how structures, iconic buildings become emblem of a country and very soon the new tallest building in the world, the Kingdom Towers in Saudi Arabia would be the symbol of Saudi Arabia. So it is very important that we focus on how we use real estate to develop the economy, empower people, increase the number of jobs available and we develop our economy.
We can also pick a kind of destination. Real estate has made Dubai a destination. From desert to destination. Real estate has made Singapore a first world country where more than 95 per cent of the country live in social housing, in apartment which is what we should replicate in Lagos. Las Vegas was built through real estate development over the years and it is now a destination point. We have a place like the Disney World in Orlando Florida, USA, where you get about 55 million visitors every year. This is what real estate has done for that country. America has been developed by real estate developers who have built cities, built entertainment centres that are now tourists destinations. So the opportunities are available for us in Lagos. We have the climate, we have the land, we have the seafront. People now buy houses in Spain on the beachfront. It is a place for people to retire all because of real estate. They built on Manbilla for living. Places like Morocco are attracting some Europeans who want to retire there. From over hundred years ago, people like the Europeans have been going to Morocco to Tangiers, to Casablanca to buy homes and there is a famous Hollywood movie, known as the Casablanca. Why did that movie come. It came because there are some Europeans who went to Casablanca to do business there and retire there. So we should also try to use real estate and related assets to develop Lagos State.
Do you mean symbol like the National Theatre
Well, yes, the National Theatre is also a symbol. Now looking at the National Theatre, it also needs an industry to go with it. If the theatre industry requires a building, then we develop it. What I see is that we develop buildings and then look for the industry but industry must come first. It is the same way we are building stadium without football league. It is actually a waste of money. So what would happen is that we should look for the industries that are thriving and then develop the building around it. So in a sense, we need to look at how we are going to energise those buildings, remodel those buildings to meet current needs and then make them symbols. That is when those buildings can be maintained.
Why poor Nigerians can’t own houses
Well, key to this is that first, you’ve got to have infrastructure. Infrastructure is very expensive. You’ve got to have a legal system for owning land. Once you have those things in place, it becomes easier for the poor to own a house. How do I explain this, you need to take the low income earners out of the city centre. The low income earner does not live within the city centres but when you have infrastructure, you have transportation. He can transit from where the land is cheaper to where it is expensive to work and earn a living. That is how cities work. It happens in Tokyo, it happens in Singapore, it happens in London. People live in Millthenkings and commute from outside London to Central London and they go back by train. So it happens in Hong Kong. It happens in these modern cities, it happens in New York. So you see people leaving to get what you call the rush hour traffic. Unlike the rush hour traffic, you also have the rush hour target in train transportation. People getting into these things need mass transportation. If you have infrastructure, that compensates for that. Now you can start looking at how you can build the inner city and in America you have what you call the subsidised housing where government makes an effort to subsidise the development of apartments. It makes it compulsory for you who is developing a certain real estate with concessions to give a certain amount to affordable housing. If you are allowed to do a 100 units, you might say 10 per cent of that is for affordable housing. You don’t need to have expensive finishes in it. You don’t need to have large floor areas in it. But you must keep that apartment at a particular rental level that is affordable to somebody of that category. Now, these are the hard issues. There is also the soft issue of financing. If you are going to get people to own these houses, they must be able to pay for it and the person who is going to develop it must be able to earn a living from developing it. So, it is a two way street.
So if I am a developer and going to develop a property, I should have saved a certain amount of money, may be 10 per cent, 20 per cent or 30 per cent or thereabout and I should be able to borrow the 70 per cent. When I borrow the 70 per cent and I do my development, the rent I get should be able to pay the 70 per cent over a 30 year period, then I can rent it out. And the person renting who has not saved up to 10, 20 or 30 per cent to build will be paying me rent and I can pay back the loan. And I can do that, that way I am housing people with rental income. Now when it comes to house ownership, it is the same way. I must be able to save a certain amount and then my salary should be able to pay the mortgage back. So that standard has to be met. This is what has built the European countries – America too as well. And that is what is sustaining the housing. They all tried the social housing process and they all ran into problems and a lot of them have scrapped that system. UK has sold most of their Council flats to the original owners and now the bulk of housing is done by the developers. The huge bulk of housing is done by the developers. There is still a per cent age done by the government but the huge percentage is done by the developers, by private initiatives.
Private sector investment
We need to get that system in place to encourage private initiatives. It does not stop government using taxes to ameliorate that because the government still does a lot of interjection for people who are of low income or who are disadvantaged. So it has to be a well articulated pipeline process of creating housing. You can also use the private sector to fund infrastructure. Look, people want to invest their money, some people put their money in fixed deposit, they earn 7 per cent, 6 per cent, 5 per cent on it. Government could actually create a system where they use this money to do development and give people back 10 per cent. That way you will be able to generate enough income. Now to put this package together, requires a lot of articulation of various ideas from various professions. There is a lot of money in Nigeria but it is not being utilised. That opportunity will also bring foreign investment. I can tell you that the major buyers of property in the UK are from the Middle East.
In the US, they are from China and you can see how foreign investment has built up properties in these countries. The Chad was funded by the Qartari Central Bank.
So, what we are seeing now is development being funded by money coming from all over the world. We need to have the same in Nigeria and for you to have the same in Nigeria, you also need to have security which is part of infrastructure. You have got to have electricity, you got to have good roads, you also got to have a legal system where the rule of law is respected. You got to remove corruption from the process which. Another problem we have to deal with is that of transparency, that high level of ethical and moral uprightness that will allow us to develop into the first world countries.
How do you marry it with mortgage financing?
I just mentioned in a sense in mortgage financing that it can only work when a percentage of my income can pay the mortgage. So that tells you the kind of house that I can afford. So if I earn, let’s say N20,000 a month as a low income earner, a year I earn N240,000; maximum I should be able to contribute 30 per cent of that income to his housing. If he is to contribute 10 percent of N240,000 then we are talking of N72,000 a year. That is the lowest person who is on N20,000 a month. Now, if he is going to contribute N72,000 a year, you can imagine what he can afford. That will be a percentage of the interest he is paying and he also needs to pay the capital back. So we can start to do the calculation to see the kind of house he can afford. So, if let’s say his mortgage is 5 per cent of the property he is acquiring, then if N72, 000 is 5 per cent, it means that his property would not worth more than 20 times N72,000. So he cannot afford to buy a house that is more than N1.5 million. Automatically, that is for the lowest person. So what kind of a house can he get with N1.5 million. Such a person probably can only afford a room where he is going to share a toilet, he is going to share a kitchen and there are these kind of apartments with a space like the hostel space, it is like a bed space, isn’t it? So with that amount, he can afford that so the young guy who is a cleaner probably will have lady only hostel where she can afford to pay that from her income and at the end of the day, own it and may be rent it out to someone else where they share a kitchen. We call it communal housing in the US. And some of these communal houses can only become, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms and 4 bedrooms for larger families. So this is how you build a mortgage system. It has to tailor to the income of the person.
This picture is enough to discourage the poor man from dreaming to own a house. Is there an alternative?
I don’t think he will loose hope rather, to me he will have to create a system. I painted the worst scenario of N20,000 a month and I am sure most people earn more than this, in a sense. But imagine if it were a little bit better,then such things can work but as I have said, government does not have all the money to build houses. In fact, government run into deficits when they do such things and if you look at what happened in the Soviet Union, that type of largess affected them. If you look at today, even such countries like Venezuela actually did it. Now they are reversing it where the government used their money to build houses for the people and practically gave it to them and collect nothing. Now those properties have appreciated in value, the owners want to sell it because he can’t afford to live in it. So what we are looking at is because it is an economic system, you can’t bye pass it. So you need to work at it to create it . And when you create it, it creates revenue. The truth is this, if we actually develop the infrastructure and an enabling environment, people who collect interest rates at 1 per cent, 2 per cent abroad will come to Nigeria and be able to provide the housing for the poor and for the poor people to pay for it. If we do that, if we create that enabling environment, that investment comes in. The cost of housing will drop. There would be an abundant of it and we would also have to watch it. Do you know why? When we create that enabling environment, we can also create a burble and when the burble bursts, it will also be bad for the economy because if there is too much investing in housing, you overbuild and the price will crash. That is what happened in 2008 that affected the whole world. There was too much investment in real estate and it was now manipulated, debt were being accrued and there was no security backing it. It really need to have a contribution. You just have to sign an agreement and move into a house and start to pay the mortgage. And a lot of that affected development. It created a burble. So one has to be careful about that. So it has to be something that is structured and monitored. That is institutions that do it. There were zero down payment packages that were created in America and investment in real ester was being seen as the most viable then these debt were bundled and sold to other people who did not look at it that these things were not backed with any security. When you do a mortgage, the security is the property but the engine is the person who lives in it. Income is what you are dependent on. If you recover the house, it is worthless if there is nobody to pay the mortgage for it.
A lot of houses in Nigeria do not have C of Os, why is it so.
You see the legal system of confirming titles need to be looked at again. Lagos has one of the most vibrant economies, in fact it is the second largest economy in West Africa after Nigeria but if we do not get that legal system in place where you can fast tract getting title to land, transactions become difficult. Let me give an example, it is so easy to sell your car because within a short time you can do the change of name and the car is transferred but when it comes to land it becomes very very difficult. The process is delayed, it is difficult. But car ownership, there is the registry, the processes are there. It is so easy. Some cars are more expensive than properties.
Is it on the part of government?
I don’t want to say so but we need to fast tract that process. In some countries, within the next two weeks, you get your title to whatever property you buy and the whole process is not as cumbersome as what it takes here. So that is what we should be driving at, removing he bureaucracy and the red tape and making it transparent. You can check the title of your property online in most countries. You can verify titles without restrictions. It is a public thing. But that comes with my saying of transparency too as well.
How can we avoid the fake estate developers that are now on prowl?
That also is the issue of transparency. If somebody gives me a property and say please I want to sell this property. I will go and check online to find out whether he owns it or not. It removes the gimmicks that in front of me and fly fliers and posters. So there has to be a way where I can check up something. You can imagine now, most people if you really want to search about somebody you can google their names and do so many things and find out who they are. That trend need to be taken into the issue of properties. Now it is going to create a lot of transparencies and remove corruption because you can know who owns what. Why they own it. Some people can of hide behind such things again. That is a trend that we have to develop. It is going to be earthshaking for us to achieve that. Now for those who do all these things, they do it because the common man do not have a way of verifying.
I have been once introduced to such property and I said, do you have title, do you have a survey to this land. Can you show me the document to this property. Of course, the person could show and then walked away. Meanwhile he was about to sell this to unsuspecting bankers. And a lot of them in the past have deposited money for these estates but they do not know where the land was and they lost their money. So there has to be a structure in place and the public need to be enlightened. There is a statement, ‘Caviet Emptor’ let the buyer beware. It happens even in America and in UK too. I give you one example. I and a group of Nigerian Architect once went to Dubai to a conference and we met some young ladies from Britain who were selling property in London and they said they are selling land in Kenth. They had beautiful, model, beautiful master plans and they had CDs, well packaged CDs and that you buy this land for £30,000 and that in 5 years it would worth £150,000. It looked like a good investment but they said it is an agricultural land. So it doesn’t have planning permit but that very soon within that 5 years you get it, that government is going to release more land for housing. They had given us the issue and that some people have bought. A few of my friends at that time were looking at that it is a good buy because by that time, £30,000 was like about N7 million.
So it looked affordable to them, to me it was like a good investment. I now told them, look I need to check this online because it looked too good to be true. So why don’t I investigate it, I am going to London the following week and I found out that it is not 100% a scam but it is partially one because a lot of times you may never get that land converted to residential development up till 5 years and you may not in 10 years or 15 years or not at all and you are saddled with land that you are going to pay taxes on and they have told you. They have come out open, look it is an agricultural land you are buying. So what would I do with a 500sqm, 600sqm plot of an agricultural land in the middle of Kenth? And when I got to their office, their office was just a virtual office and my friend would always say, I have fallen into that trap before and it took him an effort to recover some portion of the land not the entire thing and he has to sell it to another unsuspected buyer so that he can refund the money. And I can tell you it happens all over the world. One of the greatest place you have this scam is in the US in the early 18th century and in the 19th century too. During the gold rush, people were being scammed also in properties. So it is nothing new. There is a building in one of the cities I know used to be the tallest building but it was only 4 storey high. The man scammed them by changing the dimension of the building. Those who bought it thought it was going to be the tallest building in the world and it was going to be offices for them. What he build was a room in each floor of the four floors and 100 of people invested money but he changed the dimension of the house from feet to inches. So if the dimension was supposed to read 60 feet he actually built 60 inches. By the time he finished the building, they checked in, they wanted to take him to court but the Lawyer said but what is in the drawing is inches not feet and he made a lot of money and walked away. So this scam have always been there. It is all over the world. The truth is that the buyer needs to acquire knowledge and investigate. If you are buying from an estate, get a professional to check it carefully.
Is government finding it difficult to check them?
Well, they do but one of the things is, first and foremost before you can develop an estate, you must have approval, yes you should have approval before you start advertising. To sell land, you must have title before you can start selling property. So it should be made mandatory that if you are putting an advert, you put a small place the status of your land. So the public can check it. And when you have a public registry that people can walk in to find out, oh there is somebody advertising this land, you still have title, it becomes easy. There should be a process where I can search for, look in the UK, if I wanted to get title, there are processes I can go online. If I wanted to get building permit, I can do it online, the planning portal, I can submit approval online without having to show up at the office. I can investigate if this area has title, if i can develop on it. So these are things we need to look at. We need to make the process transparent, we need to make the process user friendly. We have achieved so much in Nigeria, the banking system has revolutionized Nigeria, the telecoms system has revolutionized the country. We never use to have mobile phone, but today it is easy to have phone to make calls, to go to the Internet and check codes. We have moved away from what it used to be. So other areas have to catch up. We do banking transactions safely, we transfer money safely, we receive money safely, we use our ATM safely. So why can’t that security system be put into the land title ownership and tenure system. Even the approval process. What makes it so difficult if large sums of money that value even more that the value of the properties are used and being transacted electronically. Salaries of home ministries are not moved with cash. They are moved electronically. Isn’t it and people’s accounts are credited with almost every month in billions and we have safely been able to put it, so why can’t we transfer it to those other areas.
How do we stop building collapse in Nigeria
Well, building collapse is very complex because it emanate from various factors; it emanate from negligence, it emanate from ignorance, it can also emanate from the act of God. Now I give you scenarios, if you are going to develop a building and you brought in professionals. They would know the processes and I am sure there is no one who wants to enter an aeroplane and knows that the pilot who wants to pilot it was his friend in school who never finished school and who never went to an aviation school, was a carpenter down the road and he said he is the going to fly the plane, I am sure you would see out of the plane. But people would go and build a house and would not check out the qualification of the one who they want to give the project to . Because the truth is, if you are going to develop a house, you do project report, analysis to know the kind of person you are going to give your project to handle. Even the Bible tells us that no man should go and build a house without first finding the cost. That cost is also what does it take to put up this development. Then you get a professional who is experienced enough to do the design so that the project would be safe. Now that is the aspect where we have issues, then there is also the aspect of monitoring where even the owner himself starts to change the design after it has been established which you don’t do. You don’t increase floors, you don’t modify the building without following the right process. That is also where issues come in. If you look at most of the collapsed building, it is even all over the world. It has been the issue of over loading buildings. In very minor cases has it been the fact that the original building had a faulty foundation design. It was actually because of over loading. Go and check most building collapse. A huge number of them has been due to additional load put on the building. The famous one I had in Bangladesh that killed thousands of people was overloading of the building. They added many more floors and even put generators on upper floors. Even the signs were there, the building started to crack and dust was coming out of the walls. The bankers moved out, the owner allowed the garment workers to still stay in the building. There is one that happened in South Korea. It was an office complex that was converted into shopping mall and they removed certain structure within to make it a shopping mall from office complex.
He put heavy kitchen equipment on an upper floor to create a restaurant, put hitting device because Koreans like to sit on the floor, created additional mechanical equipment to achieve that and the building started to crack. Some people moved out but there was a shopping mall on the ground floor and it collapsed on them. So these additional weight and additional load that they put on buildings has been the major cause of collapse. Apart from also the fact that people do faulty designs in an area where you need a pile foundation, people would say, I can’t afford it, they do a raft that also sinks. Where you do a raft need a pile foundation. So it is defective and eventually the building collapse. And why constructing with poor quality materials. Shoddy workmen are brought in who are cheap. You need to have carried out the cost of the building before going out to do it so that you make it safe and a lot of due diligence are safety factors that are put in place. Now there are issues that happen, you have an earthquake, you have a sinkhole, you could have uneven settlement, your next door neighbourj could escavate too deep below your foundation and can cause your building to collapse. There are also acts like that, that are third party actors that could bring your building to collapse and we need to always investigate the cause of collapse and know why it happened. There are some areas that are due to landslide, due to earth movement and also wrong methodology in developing these areas. There is an area of Anthony where the fence always collapse whenever it rains. The reason is that they are not using retaining walls and retaining walls are very expensive to build because they are force concrete. So that has to be put in place. I have another case where the fence actually collapse and killed somebody outside the fence because it wasn’t actually concrete retaining walls. So these are issues and you have to make that the foundations are deep enough to be seated on the required bearing capacity for this foundation.
Do you think government is doing enough in that regards?
Well, government needs to do a lot more. They have put a lot in place and you see, when we say government, we are all part of government. Someone said we get the leaders we deserve yes because we picked them out of ourselves. So, we are part of government and should not see government as a separate entity. The question is, are we doing enough as members of the society? It might be in educating the public, it might be in letting the public know this is the right thing to do. This year alone, I have had two cases where a client has asked me to do something and I said sorry this cannot be done. It is against ethics, it is against the law of the land. This will not be approved and I will not be party to doing something that is illegal; building on setback, adding another floor on to a building that you cannot get approval for and in that situation I had to tell the client, you can keep your money. So that is also a step that we need to take. Some of the collapses you have, all come out as the owner compromising and when the owner is ready to pay and the work man needs money, you are inducing him. The workman knows you are adding another floor but the man is ready to pay with any amount it takes. Go ahead and do it, you are already inducing this poor man to commit a crime. So the person inducing and the person receiving are both guilty. That is why I said it is not government also expected but we are all involved in this and we are all party to it. To solving this problem, it should be labeled on government alone.
Can you give estimate of all the human and material losses we incur as a result of collapse building?
Ah, that will be difficult because a lot of the losses you see are not recorded. Some of them you don’t know. I will start with the losses that occur in people dying on site on a daily bases from falls or objects falling on them. Some being injured because people don’t have safety equipment. People don’t follow safety procedure. That is a huge number. More people die from accident on site than those that die on building collapse because all over Nigeria, on a daily bases, people are dying. There are a thousand and one site all over Lagos where safety is not taken seriously, scaffolding is not well placed. Things are arranged in the wrong places, things are done half haphazardly. So more people die from falls than die from actual collapse building.
That is not actually not reported, they are simply carried to the hospitals, carried to the morgue and that is the end of the story and it is happening all over the world. That is a truth. There is a high incidence even in places like Dubai, in Qatar and it get into the news that these workmen are simply dying on a daily bases. Even, it happens in America.
Why don’t we have the data here in Nigeria?
It is because they are never reported. If that thing has to be brought open, construction companies need to be registered, need to publish their safety data. When we have monitoring teams that go to site, such things should be checked. That way we will be able to, you see accidents will always happen. There will always be factual accidents. People will actually make errors. Some errors are even caused by the workmen themselves. In some sites, they would need to check you for alcohol, yes they need to check if you take drugs. In some cases you take bretaliser test before you are allowed into the site to work because the person who is drunk will always make mistakes. It is even said, even medication, sometimes if you take certain medication, you should not be allowed to work on the site. If you take cough mixture, you will not be allowed to handle any mechanical equipment on the site, drive a truck, handle the crane because you will be drowsy and when you are drowsy, the same way the driver who is sleeping on the steering is going to cause an accident. So these are things we need to put in place and this require a lot of enlightenment and monitoring.
We have a lot of gigantic buildings every where, people are occupying them both for offices and residential, do you think they are taking into consideration how to maintain them?
I will say that is a huge problem. I always caution people who buy properties in estates especially blocks of flats whether they have seen the maintenance agreement that you signed? But you bought this property. What is the duty and responsibility of the developer and you too. And one of the first things I told one of my clients was this, when you build your house, you know that the generator will last 5, 6, 7 years, so you have to replace it. You know that even the life span of equipment in most houses will last within that of 10 to 15 years. Your lift has a life span, plumbing can get blocked, sewage can by somebody flushing damage it, who does the repair, who maintains if there is leakage, when there is damage who does repair? So if I am living in a block of flat and my neighbourj upstairs blocks his pipes and floored his apartment who is responsible, is it him, is it me? If he damages his house, set it on fire, and it affects my own apartment, who is responsible? So, if the soak away gets full who clears it or it collapses or somebody drove a heavy truck over it and destroys it who repairs it. So all these things are maintenance agreement and processes that need to be documented. Once they are not, we are kind of living in a property with a lot of risks. So these are things you to put in place and there no person even those who build a house for themselves who does not spend a percentage of that money in maintaining that house. He will paint after some years. His gate, close it and open it will deteriorate, it will wear out. When it deteriorate and wears out, who is going to repair it? So all these need to be put in place. The maintenance cost need to be attached. If you buy an apartment in the US, which I investigated. You pay a homeowner’s fee which is a fixed sum you pay. That has nothing to do with your utility cost, that has nothing to do with the water rate you pay, that has nothing to do with garbage disposal, that has nothing to do with your telecommunication cost. Those are usage costs because there is a fix sum you pay each month. In one apartment, it is like you pay a $1000 each month as homeowner’s fee. So the use that money to maintain the hard aspect of the building. So even the building itself has assets which is the way it should be living in an apartment. So that apartment you buy for about $300,000, in a sense you may be paying about $12,000 each year as homeowner’s fee. Now the more the apartment, the lower that figure is paired among the owners. So if I was living is a luxury apartment and is a low income apartment, yes it could actually be a low income apartment that has may be about 50 flats and you have two large lifts to serve them. Assuming the lift cost about N25,0000,000 each and there are 50 apartments it should be shared at N.500,000 per apartment to buy such lift. Let’s assume the lift require maintenance of a million a year, it means that you are going to divide N1 million by 50 to get the annual maintenance cost for the lift. It is going to cost that. Now, that is the cost to pay for maintenance. Over a five to eight year period, the lift has a warrantee. It should be able to tell you, oh! in five years, we are going to change this and this and this and this is the bulk cost. So you must have amassed some money for that. To paint means there is a yearly contribution. So even after buying the house, I have to be leaving a certain amount to put that house in proper condition because inevitably, a house is like a human being. You cannot give birth to a child and don’t feed it, don’t cloth it, not send it to school. So those buying into these gigantic buildings should look into the facility management that are being reached. As a professional, I will ask these questions on how to maintain a,b,c,d and e in the properties and if this happens, who does what? Do I have insurance to cover me which might be required? So if accident happens, my insurance is going to cover me. In most estates, it is like you create what is called a condimonium apartment in America where in actually, when that thing is happens, will the owners of the apartment come together and form a corporate body that manages that place. So if there is 50 of us there, the 50 of us come together, we own our share of the property and we rotate it and manage it. We have accountants and auditors who manage our financing, who look at the due process of maintaining those places. Some of this condimonium apartments, if you want to sell, you will have to offer it to the other members first and then you can only sell to any other person they approve. So they maintain a certain status quo in that apartment. Because of that level of diligence at structure, those places become very expensive because you cannot have a riffraff coming in, you cannot have a criminal coming to live there, you have people of certain like minds living in such apartments. So such things are so structured that if on noise level you are allowed to have are maintained. You cannot just wake up one day and start to raise the volume of your, CD or TV. The buildings are actually designed for that very luxurious apartments. They are so designed that you cannot hear sound transmit from one apartment to the other. For in lone income apartments, you can’t afford to achieve such acquisitive levels . So in lots of low income apartments, you actually see noise transmit. You have to live within such environment because it is cheaper building. So this how things are put in such perspective. So in some very expensive buildings, the owners, before they buy test it. Look I want to throw a party in my apartment, I can be as loud as I wish and nobody will hear outside. So they actually do that for, because they are rich people who have big sitting rooms, 200sqm living room. At a conference I went last year in New York, they were talking about the most expensive apartment in New York that was bought for about $100 million but you can expect what you see in such apartments. He will be throwing cocktails in the room on regular bases to show off his apartment because he is a high net worth individual. Of course he might have a neighbour and it happened that the doors are artistically designed and the walls are the same and it doesn’t disturb anybody. Floors are acquistically designed not to transmit noise. So these are thing people have looked at in any building. If you are looking at low income, you have to tell them look, you cannot raise your TV above certain volume. You cannot throw a party in this house, so you have to go and rent some tents down the road or small hall to do it, there is not allowed. This place, there is no party allowed but in these big buildings you can have a dog because if the do backs, it won’t disturb anybody. These are things that are structured in terms of facility management. Well, we have a long way to go in Nigeria. There is a condimonium law in the US, so if people breach the law, you can actually take them to court. So when such laws are established in those apartment complexes, if you air, you can be thrown out, if you are arrested for any criminal activity, you can loose your property. That is the truth, if you are arrested for any criminal activity which means you are found to be a criminal, your property will be auctioned. In most cases, even in some case it is seized by the state, just like even in some professional bodies, there is hardly any professional body today that if you are judged to have committed a crime and you go to jail, charger say you should loose your license.
