House hunting in Lagos and moving to Ibadan — A personal experience

House hunting in Lagos and moving to Ibadan — A personal experience

Gypsy

The day my spirit leaves Lagos, my body has just spent seven hours in traffic for an 8km journey.

The year is 2019, and I am already fed up with the Lekki floods. I am in the second month of my NYSC, managing operations at my aunt’s logistics company at Ikota Shopping Complex, VGC. One evening in November, I leave the office at 5 PM for a 15-minute drive home. Throw in Thursday evening traffic at Ajah Under Bridge and Abraham Adesanya, and I should be home in no more than 45 minutes.

Except, I won’t.

By the time I get to my street, it is 20 minutes short of midnight. I am not looking forward to the next day when I am likely to experience the same thing again. Spoiler alert: I eventually do.

I start saving to move out from Lagos once I’m done with my service year.

But plans change. February 2020, the logistics manager punches me in the face; I resign. No more income to save for Project Japa Lagos.

I update my LinkedIn and, three weeks later, I land a remote job at a San Francisco-based food tech startup. Earning in dollars gives me more leeway to ramp up Project Japa Lagos.

The lockdowns begin, and I settle into the work-from-home life. I no longer need to leave my house, and for months I don’t. I still want to leave Lagos, but the urgency has dialled down. I end up staying put until the end of the year. After all, when I am ready to move, I’ll just browse through listings on PropertyPro and find an apartment. It can’t be that hard.

Heh. Egungun is about to enter the express, and he does not even know it yet.

Hobo

December comes, and I’m not so keen on leaving Lagos anymore. Relocating seems like overkill. After all, it’s where all the juicy career opportunities exist, in case I need to leave my current job. To avoid the floods and constant Lekki-Epe traffic, I decide to get an apartment on the mainland instead.

I meet Chioma through Twitter. She’s found a lovely two-bedroom apartment at Ogudu and needs a flatmate. For ₦800k per annum, it’s a steal.

Looking good, my G!

Meanwhile, the holiday starts crazy early for my Uncle’s family: they plan to travel to the village by the first week of December. I have found a house, and so, no need to travel. They lock the compound. I pack a bag and leave Sangotedo for Ikeja.

I check into a plush hotel in Ikeja on Friday the 8th. The plan is to spend the weekend in style, attend the Lagos Social Hangout, and move into my new apartment on Monday. Life couldn’t be sweeter.

Only, it isn’t.

Saturday passes, no word from the agent. Sunday expires, still no word.

Maybe the agent doesn’t work weekends, I reckon.

Monday comes and goes. On Tuesday, it dawns on me that the agent has no plans to close the deal — he’s most likely handed the house to someone else. I am stranded in a costly hotel room in the heart of Ikeja. I ask to move to a less expensive room downstairs where I will spend the rest of the week.

Week two and I have spent almost ₦150k on accommodation alone. I meet agents, drive around Lagos mainland in the day and work all night. None of the apartments is any good, but I am lucky thus far; none of the agents has tried to fleece me. Little do I know that this luck is the calm before the storm.

By the end of the second week, I can no longer afford to stay in the hotel. I call my friend and book a much cheaper hotel in far away Aguda.

Stranded, frustrated, burned out, I am willing to pay for a house as far as FESTAC or Satellite town if it comes to that.

By the third week, I meet the bad and the ugly agents. From Mile 2 to Maryland, Ago Palace to Gbagada, I meet the one with a belly the size of a planet, who chews and talks simultaneously, bathing me in smelly saliva. I meet the man whose head looks like he’s been in too many fights — and won too few of them. Another one yells at me over the phone and asks me to meet him in Ikotun at past 9 PM.

One agent even asks me to pay 70% of the annual rent upfront before he even shows me a mini flat.

I have spent over 200k in two weeks chasing shadows all over Lagos.

At this point, I will take a house in Ajegunle. I don’t care; just make it stop! And so I check into a hotel in the ghetto.

The dingy room, which costs ₦5k a night, is a cocktail of odours —the bedroom has witnessed too many farts and even more insecticides. The sheets smell of sex and urine. The bathroom smells of bleach and even more urine. I lock the door, fighting the urge to vomit.

I work all through the night, trying to appease a CEO who won’t give me a day off.

I have never hated my life so much.

Wanderer

I spend the next two days chasing dead ends in Ajegunle. By the end of the week, I must have called every agent on the Mainland. On Friday morning, sleep-starved and jumpy from too much caffeine, I take a cab to Ogudu.

I meet Chioma again, and she helps me find a hotel on Ogudu Road. The cheapest room costs ₦8,500 per night and is barely a step up from the room in Ajegunle. The room, with walls covered halfway with tiles, was once a large bathroom; it has a washbasin right next to the TV!

Chioma tells me that she’s been househunting since July and will give up if she does not get anything decent that weekend. We meet agents that take us to refuse dumps and waterlogged compounds. One agent who hisses at the end of every sentence takes me to a room-and-parlour flat in Alapere with a kitchen that cannot fit a toddler. He tells me the apartment costs ₦700k per annum excluding agency and agreement fees.

Another agent takes us to a 2-bedroom flat that costs ₦1 million. This house is *insert chef’s kiss* perfect.

Except, it’s right next to an Apostolic Church.

Another agent mocks us, calls us broke kids, says if we want good accommodation, we must increase our budget. We say, “No problem. Just take us to a decent house. We don’t mind sleeping on the floor after we move in.”

For ₦1.5 million, this agent takes us to the outskirts of Ogudu, to an apartment that will crumble to the ground if you shove it with your pinky finger. Chioma cusses the man with all the energy in her body.

I curse under my breath, go back to my hotel room, sling my backpack over my shoulder, and board the next bus to Ibadan.

Settler

I arrive in Ibadan on a Sunday evening. The okada man charges me ₦800 from Iwo Road to Scripture Union Guest House in Sango.

Three days later, I find two apartments built for actual human beings. The first house costs ₦370k. It is a delightfully built 2-bedroom bungalow in Akobo Ojurin, which means it is too far away from anywhere. The second is a small studio apartment in a beautiful block of flats at Agbowo for ₦300k. A new building with solar panels, the agents claim that electricity lasts 24-hours here.

I have spent over ₦250k in less than three weeks, so I figure it would cost a lot less to furnish the self-con. The other rooms in the building are filling up quickly and FOMO is building up. A potential red flag is that I am not allowed to use a personal generator. I raise this concern, but the agents and the building manager assure me of the durability of the central solar system.

I pay and move in just in time for Christmas. Finally, I can rest (or can I?)

Remember the solar panels and the 24-hours electricity claim? Turns out it’s a sham.

Harmattan ends, and the heatwave that follows rips off the glossy veneer and exposes the architectural faults of the building. Ventilation is a huge issue, and there’s precious little natural lighting. With 45 rooms occupied, the solar inverters start powering down too quickly. Someone tampers with connection, and it gets even worse. Agbowo doesn’t have great electricity after all. I purchase a 1000-watt inverter setup along with a rechargeable fan to supplement.

But even these aren’t enough.

In March, there’s a complete blackout in Agbowo. The building has no backup generator, so no electricity or water, and the building management still won’t let tenants use personal generators. My apartment grows smaller and tighter and closes in on me. I miss deadlines. My job is on the line.

I have spent over a million naira to rent and furnish this apartment, so moving is unthinkable; I start to think it anyway. I squeeze out the last of my emergency fund to begin another househunting process.

You know how people say housing is cheap and easy in Ibadan?

Dirty liars.

I meet agents even worse than those in Lagos: those claiming a house is “close to the main road,” but take me hiking into the hinterland, and those who demand an inspection fee of ₦5,000 for each apartment they take me to see. Then, there are the landlords who won’t accept single young men as tenants. At some point, I enlist Adeola’s help, to act as my fiancé.

I slip into despair, but my living conditions at the time are terrible, so I soldier on.

After another two months of intense househunting and increasing my budget by 300%, I finally find a middling flat in Onireke GRA. It ticks most of my boxes: serviced compound, a reasonably sized kitchen, a decent part of the city, a central location close to the commercial nerve centre, a great power supply, I'm allowed to use my personal generator.

It’s been five months since then, and I’ve pretty much had to restart my life. I am still yet to fully furnish my “new” apartment. But it looks like I will stay here for a while.

My flat is a long way from perfect, but it’s significantly better than my previous options. It’s been a wild, crazy ride here, one best avoided. But It’s nice to finally have an anchor point.

We move!

I learned a few hard lessons learned from my first-time househunting experience in Lagos and Ibadan.

1. Plan to start househunting at least two months before you move. If you wait until the eleventh hour to wing it like me, you gonna see crazy.

2. You’ll have to pick your poison. Unless you’re super-rich, real estate down here is a hot mess. Make a list of essential requirements for your ideal house and hope to find something close to it. Househunting is stress and inshallah. When you inspect a house, review your list and develop another list of pros and cons. Hopefully, you find something that checks off most (or, in rare cases, all) of your boxes.

3. The only way to get the perfect apartment is if you know someone who knows someone who knows someone that is moving out of their amazing apartment.

4. Be cynical, always be prepared to (loudly) lose your shit. There is no love and light or calm talk in these streets. Keep in mind location, costs, the impression of the landlord, and the overall quality of the apartment. Don’t leave anything to chance.

5. Be prepared to up your budget a bit. Sorry, but most times, you will end up spending above what you planned to get what you want.

6. Don’t rush it. Desperation will make you do crazy shit. Refer to (1) above.

7. Have many friends, please! Friends make the experience a whole lot easier. Friends will save your life! Don’t be a lone-wolf motherf****r like me.

But even if you struggle to get (or ask for) help while moving, the lessons I learned from it can guide you!

Bonus lesson: If anyone tells you, “Houses are cheap in Ibadan,” believe them to your detriment.

The “Ibadan is cheap cliche” stopped being true in 2019. Yes, houses are relatively cheaper in Ibadan than in Lagos, but you will still need to dig into your purse for a decent house in a nice part of town. More on this in future posts.

Thanks for reading my long shalaye. I will be sharing more about setting up a home office and navigating career and work-life balance as a young person in Nigeria on this channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to my weekly newsletter so you don’t miss anything!