In our series of conversations on City People Instagram Live Chat, with very accomplished Nigerians, who are doing very lovely things in their different areas, we recently spoke to a Real Estate guru. Mr. Hakeem Ogunniran. He is an accomplished real estate practitioner. For very many years he was the MD, CEO of UAC of Nigeria Property Development Company (UPDC). He ran that for a long time before he retired to set up his own company called Eximia Realty Company. And since he came on board two years ago, the company has been doing very, very wonderful things in the real estate sector. This real estate guru is the founder, CEO of Eximia Realty Company, and Home4Me Nigeria Limited. He spoke about how Covid-19 has affected the real estate. The opinion is divided on that. Some people feel Covid-19 has helped the real estate. Some people feel it has affected it negatively. So it was interesting listening to the perspective of Mr. Ogunniran on the real estate sector.
As we come out of Covid-19 Pandemic what are the key lessons, to learn from the experience?
Anybody who says they were prepared for COVID is basically just practically deceiving himself because the circumstances and the impact of COVID was so major, and it was so sudden, it was so significant you know. But there are lessons that we can take from it.
Number one is that your risk management strategy must be very, very robust. And, particularly in terms of how you respond to major disruptions in the market place. Covid was disruptive, Covid was destructive. Both disruptive and destructive. So your response to such in terms of how you quickly reorganize your working has to be drastic. For me for example, in my office, the first thing I did was to shutdown even ahead of the general lockdown. I had shut down my office.
I shut down my office like a week and half before the general lockdown because when I saw the intensity of what was happening in the market, I just made up my mind that there was no point exposing my people to unnecessary risks. So I shut down and I told everybody to work from home. We also shut down our scaff site until when governor now said we should open the sites again.
It has also taught us that the digital ecosystem has come. You have to understand how to play in the digital ecosystem. You know, real estate is a very conservative segment so usually we are always, we always adopt technology late. You know again, in this part of the world especially, but we know now with blockchain, with proptech, with artificial intelligence there are whole lot of new ways of doing business, both in terms of construction, in terms of project management, in terms of property marketing and sales you know.
Another lesson that we must learn as businesses is that we must also understand that we need to retune our people. So when Covid happened, one of the things that I did was to ensure that I opened Training opportunities. I mean I had a very small team, so the first thing was that I brought an expert on Branding and Digital Tecknology to come and take us through …the new ways of doing business in the digital ecosystem. I also brought another expert on Sales and Marketing, Post-Covid and how to play very well in the market, you know. So, of course that gave…me also and my people a new sense of how we should be thinking of things in the market.
So Digital is very critical. If you ignore that space, you are doing it at your peril. And those are the kind of lessons I believe we can take away, from what has happened.
Everybody now talks about the New Normal. What should be the new normal for the real estate sector?
Clearly, Covid-19 has foisted a faith accompli on all of us. So the new normal for real estate and I believe also for all other segments, is a situation whereby life cannot be the way it was. There is a new era now, there is a new operating framework, and you must understand that because now, there are new rules of social interaction. There are new rules on social distancing. There are rules on HLC and compliance.
So whatever you do across the entire real estate value chain, you must take account of these new rules. For example, you have to be a lot more grounded in your designs. Your designs must recognize the new rules on social interaction. If you are building like a shopping mall today now, you must infuse things like remote sensors, remote control doors, because one of critical elements of the new rules of social interaction is that we must minimize touch points and physical interactions as much as possible.
I will imagine that for example, we are about to start a shopping mall complex now, and I am very grateful that we didn’t complete design before all these things happened. Because there are a whole lot of new and simple things that we need to put…I mean, something as simple as the kind of faucet you use in your toilet, the kind of tap that you use. You have to use remote control taps and all those things which before was considered like a nice thing to have. But today, they are becoming very basic. You know, that is new normal in terms of design.
In terms of Marketing, I already mentioned that now, you will not be able to take people on site visits, and site inspections as much as you used to do. So you have to do things like virtual reality tour, augmented realities. So today now, we are upgrading our own website as well. In another two months, it will be possible for our customers to go online, take a look at any particular project and undertake a tour basically from our website you know. So even in terms of marketing, it is a new normal. You have to play more in the digital ecosystem because everybody practically lives in that ecosystem. So to be able to tap into that, you have to ensure you also key into that.
In this New Normal, I think that real estate should be less opportunistic. Your project should be Strategic and Targeted. I don’t think this is the time to embark on opportunistic development. I think this is the time to focus on…and incidentally, a whole lot of things are happening in the market now which can help you to be a lot more targeted in the way you do your business.
I mean I sit on the board of a company called First Homes Africa. It is a company based out of Tanzania, which has just expanded into Nigeria. And that is a data algorithm company. You know there is a whole lot of analytics that happens in the industry.
So as I sit down before you today, I have an idea of how many people in Lekki want 2 bedroom flat. What is their age range? What is their income brackets. What exactly do you want? I know how many people want a terrace, how many people want a 2 bedroom flats, how many people want a one bedroom flat in Lekki, in Yaba, in Surulere. And we are trying to aggregate the whole of that data all over Lagos. So that helps you to be less opportunistic. So we are doing targeted project development and that would help the market. So I think the use of data is going to be more and more profound, it will be more and more necessary for you to use data to drive your business rather than what we used to do in those days.
I think Customer engagement is also a lot more critical. One of the things that I have found in this market is that a lot of developers used to assume for the customers. You know in those days, we assume that for a Luxury Development, these are what the customers wanted. For Premium, these are what the customers wanted. For Classy, these are what the customers wanted. But when I engaged more closely, when I sat down in focus groups, it was so clear to me that the priorities of the customers was a whole lot different.I can give you some examples.
We used to assume for example that every customer wanted a Swimming pool in the house, but that is not correct. I discovered that there are a category of customers who would rather have a crèche, a children playground than a swimming pool. Because they have small children, they even see the swimming pool as a risk to their children when they are not in the house. So if you are building for young families who are buying starter homes, young couples, swimming pool is not their priority. A lot of them already belong to clubs. They are already a member of Ikoyi Club, or Capital club or any of those clubs that they already have access to the use of many of these facilities. So you need to understand the priorities of the customer in the new normal because that would help all of us to do better in the industry.
