A new moderately priced housing estate is being developed at Iyana Oba, a fast developing community in Lagos by IHL Properties, a real estate development subsidiary firm of Ibile Holdings Limited, an agency of the Lagos State Government.
The Managing Director of the company, Mr Adeyinka Onigbanjo, said the Iyana Oba Estate would have 416 flats of two and three bedrooms.
There are eight blocks rising to four floors; ground plus three up. Homes in the estate would be sold for about N15 million. "For everything that we do, we want to put a stamp of quality.
"We want to change people’s psyche about accommodation. Right now, the psyche about accommodation to have a roof over my head, but now not only a roof, but a roof that you will always be happy to come back to.
"We have done a lot of investigations. We have gone to FESTAC and have seen how the place became a rundown. We have gone to Iyana Oba and have seen how it has evolved. We have gone to other areas like Satellite Town and we have resolved to create a kind of estate that its residents would be proud of."
Onigbanjo said to make the estate decent, about 40 per cent of the area has been devoted to greenery. "Some of us who have even lived in government quarters knew how we used to ride bicycles round the estate without fear of being run over by motorists.
Our parents knew that as long as we are within the estate, we are safe. We knew all the streets and that is the kind of estate that we are creating now. It is such that the issue of generators on the balcony (people have generators on all floors in some estates) we will allow individual generators because of the size except if we have Independent Power Project (IPP). That is when we can say no personal generators."
Their people are looking at the laws relating to power generation and distribution, because they have a Chinese company ready to embark on the project that the estate could use and then the surplus would be sold to neighbours to recoup part of their investment.
The estate, he said, would have designated points for shops unlike in some estates where kiosks are built as attachment to some flats. "All of those things will be regulated and restricted to commercial areas.
"We want to create a situation where people can take short walks of 10 to 15 minutes to the next convenience shop to buy whatever they want. We have become so captive in this country that people drive their cars to the point of their destinations otherwise they are nobody.
"We want to encourage people to take walks. We don’t have to register in gyms to make us healthy. There will be ample recreation facilities for children and adults.
"There would be a mini-football pitch and basket ball court, but no swimming pool. The theme, he said is bonding of families and this is incorporated in the design and even in the colour code. "Let people start to relate among themselves as brothers and sisters," he added.
IHL Properties, he said, has a long, term objective of being a leader in mass housing and that if this technology is suited for repetitive work, then it means that it would give us better advantage in mass housing. "Our main focus is mass housing. We want to make a big statement on decent and affordable housing.
"The technology is suitable for the Lekki terrain because the issue of differential settlement will not come into play," he said.
IHL Properties would use the tested wall ties and form technology of the United States it employed in rendering its Platinum Rows Housing Project at the Lekki axis. Wall-Ties & Forms (WTF) Inc., is the world's largest aluminum forms manufacturer and supplier as well as the premier designer of aluminum concrete forming systems and concrete formwork accessories. Over 34 years ago, as a new business, WTF manufactured wall ties-thousands of them.
The company produces and ships over 30 million ties a year and over 200,000 aluminum concrete forms to 45 countries.
The technology is based on engineering excellence, custom design, quality, service, labour saving formwork products and leading edge technology innovations, which the company’s official said tie together to form the foundation of WTF's solid relationship with their customers that saves them money, time, and reduces wasted effort.
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Source: The Nation