*Says “₦2m A Year In Lekki Gets You A Room, Not A Flat”
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A Lagos property platform, Oikus, has reported that ninety-two per cent of homes available for rent in Lekki at N2 million a year or less are self-contained units or rooms in shared flats.
The firm says it analysed 10,857 homes listed for rent and for sale in Lagos in the third quarter of 2026 to establish what the average Nigerian can afford.
“N2m a year in Lekki gets you a room, not a flat. 92% of Lekki homes for rent at N2m or less are self-cons or rooms in shared flats.”
THE AFFORDABILITY TEST
The report takes a salary of N300,000 a month, which it notes is over three times the Lagos State minimum wage of N85,000, and applies a forty per cent rule.
“Yet with 40 per cent going to rent (N1.44m a year), only seven per cent of homes for rent fit.”
THE CORPS MEMBERS
“Two corpers sharing an apartment can’t afford a typical self-contained apartment.”
The report states that forty per cent of two N77,000 allowances is N739,000 a year, which it says falls short of the cost of a typical self-contained unit or mini flat in any zone.
RENT IS NOT THE COST OF HOUSING
The report adds a year of transport to a year of rent.
A mini flat plus a year of bus fares costs N2.63 million around Ajah, N3.1 million in Yaba and N4.73 million in Lekki.
“In Ipaja, the bus fare costs more than the rent. A year of fares to VI and back is N1.43m. A typical mini flat there rents for N1m.”
The report observes that “the Ajah side beats most of the mainland.”
WHAT IT COSTS TO MOVE IN
“A N1m rent becomes N1.3m to N1.5m when you move in. That is agency, legal and caution fees. Only two per cent of listings say the caution fee comes back.”
“The smaller the home, the bigger the agent’s cut. Nearly half of N500,000 to N1m homes with a stated agency fee charge over 10 per cent.”
WHAT IT COSTS BEFORE YOU MOVE IN
“Inspecting with 10 agents can cost N50,000 to N100,000. Inspection fees usually run N5,000 to N10,000 per agent, and you pay them before you rent anything.”
ONE FLAT, SEVERAL PRICES
The report states that the same flat can have different agents and command different prices.
Of the homes listed by more than one agent, one in four came with different prices.
THE LONG LEASE
“A long lease can cost less than half the rent, if you can pay it all at once. A typical mini flat lease: N18m for about 18 years, or N1m a year, against N2.2m a year in rent.”
WHAT IT MEANS
1. The arithmetic in the report holds, and that is worth establishing before anything is argued from it. This publication has tested every figure.
A salary of N300,000 a month is N3.6 million a year, of which forty per cent is N1,440,000, which is the figure given. N300,000 against a minimum wage of N85,000 is 3.53 times, which is “over three times”. Two allowances of N77,000 are N1,848,000 a year, of which forty per cent is N739,200, which is the figure given. N18 million over eighteen years is N1 million a year, which against N2.2 million is 45.5 per cent, which is “less than half”.
The report’s internal arithmetic is sound. The argument therefore turns on the data and the method, not on the sums.
2. The number the report does not publish is the one that matters most. It tests a tenant earning N300,000 a month and finds that seven per cent of rental listings fit.
Apply the same forty per cent rule to the Lagos State minimum wage of N85,000 and the annual rent budget is N408,000.
That is twenty-eight per cent of the budget which already reaches only seven per cent of the market.
On the study’s own method, a worker on the Lagos minimum wage is not in the rental market at all. The report says a N300,000 earner can reach one listing in fourteen. It does not say what a N85,000 earner can reach, and the answer, on these figures, is that the question does not arise.
That is the finding, and it belongs in any published version.
3. The corps member figure should be read alongside what this publication reported last week. A single corps member on N77,000, applying the same rule, has N369,600 a year for rent. Two pooling have N739,200, which the report says buys nothing anywhere in Lagos.
On 20 October this publication reported Mr. Mike Igini, a former Resident Electoral Commissioner, warning that the officials who will actually conduct the 2027 general elections are serving corps members, deployed as presiding officers across 176,846 polling units, and that the lists from which they are drawn are routinely infiltrated by politicians.
On 21 October we reported Chief J. S. Okutepa, SAN, appealing to young Nigerians not to let poverty rob them of their conscience, and warning that those who recruit them have already secured their own children elsewhere.
Here is the arithmetic underneath both. A young graduate posted to Lagos cannot lawfully house himself on his allowance, and two of them together cannot. That is not a comment on anybody’s integrity. It is a description of the conditions in which integrity is being asked for.
4. The commuting figures demolish the assumption that cheaper housing is cheaper, and one of them inverts it completely. In Ipaja the report puts a year of fares to Victoria Island and back at N1.43 million against a typical mini flat rent of N1 million.
The fare is 143 per cent of the rent. The true annual cost of living in Ipaja and working on the Island is therefore about N2.43 million, which is within two hundred thousand naira of the N2.63 million the report gives for Ajah.
So the cheapest rent in the study is not the cheapest place to live, and a tenant who moves to Ipaja to save N1.6 million on Lekki rent gives most of it back to a bus.
At 250 working days, the Ipaja figure implies about N5,720 a day in fares, or N2,860 each way. That figure should be checked against actual fares before publication, because the whole paragraph stands on it.
5. The move-in cost is where the Lagos State Tenancy Law meets the market, and the caution fee is the pressure point. A N1 million rent becoming N1.3 million to N1.5 million means thirty to fifty per cent added in agency, legal and caution fees.
Only two per cent of listings state that the caution fee is returnable.
A caution deposit is, in principle, security against damage. It is the tenant’s money, held by the landlord, repayable at the end of the term subject to proper deductions. A sum taken at the start of a tenancy which is not described as returnable, and is not returned, is not a deposit. It is rent by another name.
That matters legally for two reasons. First, the Lagos State Tenancy Law restricts the amount of rent in advance that may lawfully be demanded or received. If a non-returnable “caution fee” is in substance rent, it counts towards that limit, and a landlord who has taken the statutory maximum plus a non-refundable caution fee may have exceeded it.
Second, a term that permits a landlord to retain a deposit in all circumstances, regardless of damage, is the kind of term the federal consumer protection legislation treats as unfair.
The practical advice for a tenant is narrow and useful: get the caution fee described in writing as refundable, with the deduction criteria stated, before any money changes hands.
6. The advance rent problem is real, and the statute has a gap that the market has found. The Lagos State Tenancy Law makes it unlawful to demand or receive rent in advance beyond a stated period, and makes it an offence, with the tenant who offers it also caught.
But the restriction as drafted is directed at sitting tenants. It does not, on its face, prevent a landlord demanding a year or more from a new tenant at the point of entry, which is precisely when the demand is made and precisely what the report describes.
The Law also excludes certain high-value areas from its operation. Whether Lekki falls inside or outside that exclusion is a question of the statutory text and it is not academic: it determines whether the ninety-two per cent finding describes a regulated market or an unregulated one. The desk must settle it from the Law before publication.
7. Inspection fees are the single most legally vulnerable practice in the report. The report says tenants pay N5,000 to N10,000 per agent, that inspecting with ten agents costs N50,000 to N100,000, and that “you pay them before you rent anything.”
N100,000 in inspection fees is ten per cent of a N1 million annual rent, which is the entire professional agency fee, paid out before the tenant has acquired anything at all.
Now set that against the report’s other finding: one in four homes listed by more than one agent carries different prices.
So a tenant may pay several inspection fees to view a single flat, through several agents, at several prices. The money is taken in advance, no service of value is necessarily rendered, and the consumer has no way of knowing he is being shown the same property.
The federal competition and consumer protection legislation reaches unfair and unconscionable conduct in trade, misleading representations, and charges for which no corresponding service is given. The Commission has the power to investigate this on its own motion, and this report is a sufficient basis for it to do so.
8. “The smaller the home, the bigger the agent’s cut” is a finding about regressive pricing and it has a regulator. Nearly half of homes between N500,000 and N1 million with a stated agency fee charge over ten per cent.
Ten per cent of annual rent is the conventional professional charge for letting under the published scale of the profession’s own institution.
So the tenants least able to pay are being charged above the professional rate, while tenants of expensive properties are charged at or below it.
The regulator exists. The practice of estate surveying and valuation is a statutory profession and it is an offence for an unregistered person to practise it. Lagos State has also established a dedicated authority to register and regulate real estate practitioners in the State.
The question for both bodies is simple: how many of the agents charging these fees are registered with anybody? That number has never been published and it would change this conversation.
9. The long lease is an arbitrage available only to people who do not need it. N18 million over eighteen years is N1 million a year against N2.2 million in rent. The saving is N1.2 million a year and N21.6 million over the term.
To capture it, a tenant must produce N18 million at once, which is 8.2 years of the rent he is trying to avoid.
That is not a housing finding. It is a capital finding, and it is the clearest statement in the report of why housing costs compound inequality: the discount for paying eighteen years in advance is available only to those who were never going to struggle with the rent.
And there is a warning the report does not give. A lease for a long term is not a casual document. In Lagos it requires the consent of the Governor to be valid as a transaction in land, and it is a registrable instrument. A tenant who pays N18 million for eighteen years on an unregistered agreement without consent has bought a document that may not protect him. Anybody contemplating one should take advice before paying.
10. The method must be stated honestly, because it limits what the numbers can bear. The study analyses 10,857 listings. Listings are asking prices, not achieved rents. A listed market is an agent-mediated market, and a great many Lagos tenancies are made directly with landlords, through caretakers, or by word of mouth, at prices no platform records.
So the seven per cent figure is seven per cent of the listed market, not of the housing stock. The informal market may be cheaper, or it may simply be less documented and more exposed.
None of that defeats the report. The duplicate-pricing finding in particular is strong precisely because it compares listings with listings. But the published piece must say what was counted, and this publication should ask Oikus for the breakdown of listings by zone and by type, and for the figure for the number of distinct properties behind the 10,857 listings. If one in four multi-listed homes has multiple prices, the number of listings exceeds the number of homes, and the sample is smaller than it looks.
11. There is a right in play, and it is not the one people usually cite. The Constitution directs the State to make suitable and adequate shelter available to all citizens, and then places the whole of that chapter beyond the jurisdiction of the courts.
That is where most discussions of housing in Nigeria stop. It should not be.
The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights has been domesticated by an Act of the National Assembly and is enforceable in Nigerian courts as a statute. And in a case brought against Nigeria, the African Commission held that a right to shelter is implicit in the Charter’s guarantees, even though the Charter contains no express housing article.
So the proposition that Nigerian law knows nothing of a right to housing is too simple. Chapter II is not justiciable. The domesticated Charter is. That distinction has not been tested in a Nigerian court in a housing affordability case, and it is available to anybody who wants to test it.
12. What this report actually establishes is an absence of price transparency, and that has a cheap fix. The most arresting finding is not the ninety-two per cent. It is that one in four homes listed more than once carries more than one price.
A market in which the same flat has two prices depending on who shows it to you is a market in which the tenant cannot know what anything costs, and in which inspection fees can be charged repeatedly for the same property.
A public register of lettings, recording the property, the rent actually agreed and the agent, would end it. Lagos State already registers real estate practitioners. Requiring registered agents to file concluded lettings would cost the State very little, would give every tenant and every court a reference price, and would make the duplicate-pricing finding impossible to repeat.
It would also, incidentally, give the Lagos State Tenancy Law something it has never had: a way of knowing when it is being broken.
PUT TO THE PARTIES
Oikus should be asked for the number of distinct properties behind the 10,857 listings; the breakdown by zone, by property type and by rent band; how it determined the transport figures and over how many working days; whether the seven per cent figure covers all rental listings or only those in specified zones; whether the firm charges for any of the services it reports on; and whether it will publish its methodology.
The Lagos State Government should be asked whether it intends to review the Tenancy Law, and in particular whether the restriction on advance rent will be extended to new tenants and whether the excluded areas will be revisited.
The Lagos State real estate regulatory authority should be asked how many agents are registered in the State, how many enforcement actions it has taken on fees, and whether inspection fees are regulated at all.
The Estate Surveyors and Valuers Registration Board of Nigeria and the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers should be asked what the professional scale provides for letting commission, and what the position is of persons charging such fees who are not registered.
The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission should be asked whether it has examined inspection fees, non-refundable caution fees, or the listing of a single property at multiple prices by multiple agents, and whether it will open an inquiry.
The National Youth Service Corps should be asked what accommodation support is available to corps members posted to Lagos.
The Lagos State Ministry of Transportation should be asked for current fare data on the routes the report costs.
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