Buying off plan in Lagos: what separates a discount from a loss

Off-plan pricing in Lagos is not a marketing device. Selling before completion is how most developers here fund construction, because construction finance from banks is expensive and slow, and the discount they offer is the price of your money arriving early. It is a genuine transfer of value.

It is also a transfer of risk, and the risk is concentrated in a single variable: whether the person taking your money finishes the building.

The register exists now, and you should use it

The Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority Law was signed in February 2022, and it changed the baseline. Anyone practising as an agent, broker, developer or consultant in Lagos must be registered with LASRERA. Practising without registration is an offence, and the Authority has been explicit that clients who knowingly deal with unregistered practitioners are also exposed.

Two provisions matter directly to an off-plan buyer. A developer must submit to the Authority the names and addresses of the contractors, architect and structural engineer engaged on a project. And a developer shall collect money only for the number of units actually built and available for sale.

That second clause is the one to read twice. It is aimed squarely at the failure mode that has cost Lagos buyers the most money: a developer selling forty units on a site with funding for twelve, and using each new deposit to finish the last buyer's unit.

Ask for the LASRERA registration number in writing. A developer who cannot produce one has already answered your most important question.

What to verify before the first payment

Registration is the floor, not the ceiling. Beyond it:

• The title of the land the project sits on. Not the developer's corporate credentials, the specific parcel. A C of O or a consented deed in the developing entity's name, and a survey you can chart search.
• The building approval. Lagos requires a planning permit from the state's physical planning permit authority. A project selling units before it holds approval is selling something that may be required to change.
• The delivery record. Not renders of what is coming. Addresses of what was finished. Go and look at two of them, and if you can, speak to somebody who bought in the first phase.
• Who is building it. The contractor and the structural engineer, by name, verified against the LASRERA filing.
• Where your money sits. A payment made into a corporate operating account is working capital. A payment held by a solicitor or in a dedicated project account is your deposit. These are not the same instrument.

Structure the payments against progress

The single most protective thing you can negotiate is a payment schedule tied to construction milestones rather than to the calendar.

Foundation. Frame to roof level. Roof on. Blockwork and plastering. Mechanical and electrical first fix. Finishes. Snagging and handover. Each tranche released against a stage that can be photographed and verified, ideally by someone you appoint rather than someone they do.

A developer with funding will accept this. A developer relying on your instalments to buy the next lorry of cement will resist it, and their resistance is the information you came for.

Put the delivery date in writing, with a consequence

"Twelve to eighteen months" is not a delivery date; it is a range wide enough to absorb a year of drift. Fix a date, and attach something to missing it, a discount, a penalty, an interest accrual, a right to walk with your money back.

You may not win this negotiation. But how it is handled tells you a great deal about whether the schedule you are being shown is a plan or a hope.

Price the risk you are actually taking

Naira construction costs have not been stable. Between the currency float in June 2023 and 2025, the naira cost of imported inputs, reinforcement, tiles, sanitaryware, aluminium, fittings and lifts, moved by a multiple, not a margin.

That is the pressure that breaks off-plan projects here. A developer who priced a scheme against ₦460 to the dollar and had to finish it at ₦1,550 faces a choice between eating an enormous loss, downgrading the specification, or stopping. Buyers discover which one was chosen at handover.

So when you assess an off-plan discount, ask what the developer assumed about input costs and what happens to your unit if those assumptions were wrong. A twenty per cent discount on a building that is completed to a lower specification than you were sold is not a discount.

When off plan is genuinely the right call

It is right when the developer is established, the land is titled, the approval is in place, the payments track construction, and the discount compensates you for eighteen months of your capital being illiquid and at risk.

It is right when the location is one where completed stock genuinely is not available at any price, which on parts of the Island is simply true.

And it is wrong whenever the answer to any question above is "we will send that to you later". We have listed off-plan stock and we have declined it. The difference has never been the brochure.