Hope is in the air for investors as the Federal Government prepares to launch a National Housing Data Centre, a move expected to end years of speculation over Nigeria’s true housing deficit, market size, and investment potential. The initiative, which is being coordinated by the Federal Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (FMHUD), aims to provide accurate, evidence-based data that will shape housing policies and guide real estate investment decisions across the country.
Since 2006, when the United Nations agency for human settlements (UN-HABITAT) estimated Nigeria’s housing deficit at 17 million units, figures from various sources have been largely speculative. The absence of reliable data has left investors and policymakers working with assumptions rather than facts, creating uncertainty around the scale of the problem and the required investment.
At an international housing event in Abuja, Ahmed Dangiwa, Minister of Housing and Urban Development, said, “To stem the national housing deficit put at 22 million units, the country will need to produce an average of 550,000 housing units per annum for the next 10 years. The financial outlay for this annual housing target is over N5.5 trillion per annum.”
Similarly, Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, a real estate investor, referred to a World Bank report which states that “Nigeria will need to construct around 700,000 housing units annually for the next 20 years to meet the needs of its growing population,” adding that this would require an investment of about N59 trillion over that period.
These varying estimates, experts say, reflect the absence of dependable housing data. “Nigeria needs dependable data in its housing sector. One of the biggest problems we have is a lack of data. People keep quoting 17 million units because there is no other data to prove or disprove it,” said Erejuwa Gbadebo, Managing Director of Eko Development Limited. “We talk of homes demolished, burnt, or new ones built, but who is taking record of the houses that are being built and the ones we are losing?” she asked.
Gbadebo noted that the housing industry must begin to take stock of available housing types and their market value. “There must be a way of capturing this data so that we have accurate numbers and should not continue to fight a battle we may have won or lost,” she added.
The upcoming National Housing Data Centre is expected to address these long-standing concerns by harmonising statistics across federal and state levels. According to FMHUD, the Centre will become fully operational by December, offering a unified platform that combines data from public and private stakeholders.
Taofeeq Olatinwo, chairman of the Technical Committee, National Housing Data Programme (NHDP), explained that the system will operate as a federated network, allowing states, Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to feed information into a national database at regular intervals. “The target is for the Data Centre to go live in December 2025,” he said, assuring that “it will be a federated system with inputs from states, MDAs, and private developers at defined frequencies, in line with global standards.”
