Houses in Lagos

From 1 January 2026 , Nigeria’s new tax laws officially took effect. While much of the public conversation has focused on income tax, one quiet but important change affects almost every property transaction in Lagos: stamp duty on leases. For years, stamp duty has sat in the background of Lagos real estate, inconsistently applied, poorly explained, and often overlooked in everyday transactions. That has now changed. This article explains what stamp duty means in 2026, what is different, and how it is already shaping real estate practice in Lagos,  clearly, practically, and without legal jargon. What Is Stamp Duty in Real Estate? Stamp duty is a tax paid on certain legal documents to give them formal recognition and validity. In real estate, it applies to documents such as: Tenancy agreements Lease agreements Subleases Assignments and conveyances In simple terms, stamp duty is what makes a property document legally usable. An unstamped document may exist, but it can be diffic...

When most people think of real estate in Lagos, they typically envision houses, estates, offices, or shopping malls. But quietly, a different kind of property is becoming one of the city’s most valuable assets. According to the recent  Lagos Real Estate Development Pipeline Report 2025/26 , data centres are now the fastest-growing real estate asset class in Lagos, with total capacity projected to exceed 218 megawatts (MW) by 2030. That sentence may sound technical, but it signals a significant shift in how Lagos is being developed. First, what exactly is a data centre? A data centre is a purpose-built facility that houses servers, cloud storage systems, internet exchange infrastructure, and enterprise and financial data platforms. These buildings power: banks and fintech apps telecom networks streaming platforms government systems global cloud services They are not offices or factories, but they are highly valuable real estate because they are fixed, infrastructure-heavy, and ...

Lagos’s housing challenge is often framed as a question of numbers: how many units are missing, how fast demand is rising, and how far supply lags behind population growth. But beneath these metrics lies a quieter shift that is shaping how the city expands: a  change in where risk, responsibility, and failure now sit within housing delivery . Increasingly, new residential estates in Lagos are being enabled not by full public infrastructure provision or large, balance-sheet-heavy private developers, but by collective buyer structures that step into the gap between land acquisition and livable neighborhoods. This shift has consequences that go beyond affordability or access. It alters how urban growth is financed, governed, and ultimately sustained. Historically, the logic of urban expansion followed a familiar order. The government opened up land through roads, drainage, and utilities. Developers built on that foundation. Buyers entered once neighbourhoods were largely functional....

For years, Lagos State has acknowledged a difficult truth: the city is growing faster than the government alone can plan, fund, and service. Infrastructure gaps, housing shortages, and urban sprawl have forced a quiet reordering of roles. Today, cooperative societies are stepping into a much larger role than before:  moving beyond buying housing units to funding and shaping entire developments . Cooperative societies have long been participants in Lagos’s housing market, largely as bulk buyers of homes for their members. What has changed is how deeply they are now embedded in the development process .  Across Lagos, especially along the Lekki–Epe corridor, cooperative-backed capital is funding roads, power, drainage, housing, and even entire city-scale developments. The result is an uncomfortable but necessary question: Are cooperative societies beginning to challenge the government’s traditional role in Lagos’s urban development? Aerial view of Lagos real estate growth in the...

Lagos metro map Lagos has become a city of big urban experiments. As population pressure, housing demand, and infrastructure strain continue to reshape Africa’s largest city, real estate development has increasingly shifted from piecemeal estates to large, master-planned environments. One of the most ambitious of these emerging projects is Metro Smart City , a privately led smart-city development promoted by Metrospeed Property Development Limited . Backed by major institutional cooperative societies, most recently the NLNG Cooperative Society,  the project has drawn attention for both its scale and its symbolism: a sign of how private capital is stepping in to shape Lagos’s urban future. This article explains what Metro Smart City is, how it started, who is behind it, why oil and gas cooperatives are investing heavily, and what it realistically means for Lagos’s real estate landscape. What Exactly Is Metro Smart City? Metro Smart City is a large-scale, master-planned mixed-use dev...

A guide to what the fund is, how it works, who it helps, and what Nigerians should expect next. Nigeria’s housing market has struggled for decades: high mortgage rates, short loan tenures, cash-upfront home sales, and banks unwilling to issue long-term mortgages because they lack stable funding. In 2025, the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MOFI) introduced what it calls a  transformational solution : the  MOFI Real Estate Investment Fund (MREIF) , a government-backed, private-sector–supported mechanism designed to reshape how Nigerians access housing. MREIF is more than a loan program. It is a  ₦1 trillion structured investment fund  built to mobilize public and private capital, provide low-cost mortgages, de-risk developers, and stimulate large-scale housing development across the country. It is regulated under Nigeria’s capital markets rules and operates like a modern real estate investment fund, with commercial units now trading on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX). A...