Bujeti, the Y Combinator-backed finance control centre for African businesses, and Nigeria Housing Market, the property research publication, have published Concrete & Cash Flow, a report on the trends and opportunities in Nigeria’s real estate market. It is free to read at bujeti.com/reports/real-estate.
The report follows a year in which Nigerian real estate was formally recognised as one of the largest sectors in the economy. The National Bureau of Statistics’ 2025 rebasing moved real estate to third place, displacing crude oil and natural gas, with post-rebasing figures putting sector output at ₦41.3 trillion in nominal terms in 2024.
Concrete & Cash Flow argues that the sector’s measurement has not kept pace with its size. The Federal Ministry of Housing’s National Housing Data Technical Committee put the national shortfall at 14.925 million units in January 2026. Lagos State authorities, counting an additional 15.2 million structurally defective or substandard homes, put the effective shortage closer to 28 million. Both figures come from official sources, and the market plans and lobbies on whichever suits the argument being made.
What is in the Concrete and Cashflow Report?
This report has eleven chapters covering financing, housing supply, land value and title, short-lets, land banking, construction costs, rent, the payments layer beneath property businesses, the fixed-return era, what comes next, and policy. Each chapter sets out the trend as the evidence describes it, then the opportunity it opens.
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It draws on interviews with ten operators, conducted over two months using an identical question frame; and a secondary research graded by confidence tier; contributors include John Oamen of CutStruct, Tunde Balogun of SmallSmall, Temidayo Oloyede of Edala Development, Yemisi Itepu formerly of Pertinence Group, Osezino Egweni of Pertinence, Jeffrey Ehikioya of Abode, Ekeh Emmanuel of Afrikcity Developments, Sokari Gills of Roofteller, Nnamdi Uba of Sytemap and the property lawyer Temiloluwa Dosumu of Landsafe.ng.
Findings in the report sit against a market repricing on several fronts at once. Land within five kilometres of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway appreciated 25 to 40 percent between the first quarters of 2025 and 2026, with Ibeju-Lekki plots that sold around ₦15 million in 2024 now asking ₦25 to 35 million. Lagos activated its 2026 Fair Market Value framework, the Blue Book, on 1 May 2026, lifting official land valuations and taking Governor’s Consent on a Lekki Phase 1 transaction from between ₦12 and ₦18 million to between ₦40 and ₦90 million. A 50kg bag of cement now retails between ₦12,000 and ₦15,000, against about ₦7,500 a year earlier, and materials represent 50 to 70 percent of a project’s cost.
Against that, the subsidised federal mortgage rail has begun to move. MREIF has now disbursed more than ₦140 billion to over 2,000 borrowers across 27 states at 9.75 percent fixed for up to 20 years, while commercial mortgages in the report price between 25 and 32 percent.
The finding the operators kept returning to
When asked how construction money actually moves, Yemisi Itepu, who ran operations across a national property group, estimated that as much as 80 percent of it still goes through what she called the send-me-your-account-number kind of thing: an approval reached in conversation, by email or on a messaging app, followed by a bank transfer typed by hand, with no system connecting the decision to the money.
“We are not trying to be right about Nigerian real estate. We are trying to give the people who run it a shared set of facts to disagree over. Right now a developer in Epe, a diaspora buyer in Houston, an estate manager in Ikeja and a policymaker in Alausa are all making consequential decisions from different numbers, most of them unsourced, many of them supplied by whoever stands to gain from the transaction. You cannot build policy on that, and you certainly cannot price risk on it. A shared record is the cheapest piece of infrastructure this industry could give itself, and it has been missing for thirty years,” said Caleb Nnamani, the report’s author and Bujeti’s PR and storytelling lead.
“Every ambitious African business should be able to run its finances with a CFO in the room, whether or not it can afford to hire one,” said Cossi Achille Arouko, co-founder and chief executive of Bujeti. “Real estate is where that gap is widest. The money moves at the speed of a site, and the record of it moves at the speed of a month-end close.”
What the numbers let stakeholders do
The publishers have framed the report around use rather than interest. A developer can price title and perfection into a land budget on the day the land is budgeted for, rather than discovering the Blue Book after a transaction has been signed. An investor can test a corridor claim against a named catalyst and a verified title instead of a brochure. A lender can see, for the first time in one document, why Nigerian project lending is priced the way it is. A policymaker can read the supply gap against what the market is actually building, which is largely not the ₦25 million to ₦200 million band where most purchases happen. And a diaspora buyer gets the questions to ask before wiring money against a survey plan.
Concrete & Cash Flow is the first edition of a planned annual measurement. A quantified operator panel is in the field and reports in edition two. The report is free here.
Last updated: October 12, 2026
