Details on the Collapsed Building in Lagos

Site of the collapse

A three-storey building collapsed on Oloto Street, Ebute Meta, Lagos on Thursday morning, leaving no fewer than seven people dead, while seven others were critically injured.

Among the dead were a one-year-old baby and the mother, a pregnant woman and her husband. An unspecified number of occupants of the house were still trapped in the rubble.

The baby was found dead on the chest of the mother. The husband and the rest of their children, however, survived.

Eyewitnesses told our correspondents that the building came down around 2am while residents were still sleeping.

One of them, Dr. Femi Adagunduro, said immediately the building collapsed, he made a call to the state emergency lines.

He added that there was no response until 7am, when rescue officials started arriving at the scene.

He said, “Perhaps the causalty figure would not have been high if the rescue officials had responded on time. I called them about seven different times, and they kept telling me they were coming.”

He explained that many people in the area had noticed the poor state of the building, adding that nothing was done about it.

It was gathered that the building was owned by one Alhaji Yaqub Oladimeji.

A survivor, Mr. Ayodeji Adebayo, explained that the building had shown signs of weakness before it collapsed.

He said, “I was lucky to come out safely with my family. The incident happened within just five minutes.

“One of our neighbours heard a sound as the building was collapsing and raised the alarm. Some of us were thus able to rush out and escaped being trapped.

Another survivor, Mr. Ufuoma Ejiro, said, “I was about to sleep when I heard some sound like that of a breaking wall. I investigated and noticed that it was the wall of our building that was collapsing. I shouted to alert people and within five minutes the whole building had collapsed.”

A former tenant of the collapsed building, Mr. Akin Gbaja, said government officials had marked the house on several occasions for demolition but the landlord always managed to stop it.”

Is Real Estate Ever A Wise Investment For Retirees?

At one point in my life you might have heard me say something like, “I’ve probably made more money in real estate by accident than I have in the market on purpose.” For many years, you could buy good-quality property, as much as you could afford, and you were almost guaranteed to make money. That ended in 2008. Now folks are looking for bargains, hoping to profit from the crash.

So what has changed? I don’t have to tell you that the commercial and residential real-estate markets took a huge hit in 2008 and have yet to fully recover. Many folks saw the value of their homes drop by 40% or more, and their net worth drop right along with it. In the meantime, bank short sales have skyrocketed.

Opportunities to buy may be returning, but something else has also changed. Folks on either side of the retirement cusp are in a different place in life than when they bought their McMansions. Children have fled the coop, so their needs have changed. Also, retirees and folks approaching retirement cannot afford a do-over. We no longer have time to recover from investment losses … certainly not if we plan on staying retired.

When we conducted a survey of readers last fall to see what was on their minds, investment wise I mean, real estate investing was in the top 3. The other two were annuities and income investing. We’ve covered both several times, most recently here and here.

With real estate investing a hot topic, I’d like to review the Money Forever Five-Point Balancing Test and see how it applies to real estate. It’s the test we apply to all of our investments, not just stocks.

Real Estate Investing: Is Now The Time To Take Advantage Of The Buyer's Market?

While I spent well over three decades writing books and teaching the subject of negotiations, some of the best lessons I learned on the subject came from luck.

Many investment pundits recommend taking full advantage of the current buyer’s market in real estate. Lenders are foreclosing on many properties, often selling them at a loss. At the same time, many private sellers are listing their property on the market well below what they paid for it. This presents wonderful buying opportunities for those who can take advantage of them. If you are going to buy property, you want the best price you can get.

In the late 1970s, we moved our family from Chicago to Atlanta. Two of our three children were in high school, so the timing was not ideal. To help sell the kids on the idea, we made a family pact to vote on our new house. We’d continue to look until we had a unanimous “yes.”

After a couple of days of traipsing around the school district we wanted to live in, we had narrowed it down to two homes, each with all five “yes” votes. The asking prices were about $2,000 apart, and we really could not decide.

The next morning we met the realtor and told her about our strategy. We would put in an offer on both houses at 50% of the asking price. I asked her to tell each of the sellers that we loved their home, were prequalified, and knew that the ultra-low offer would not be accepted. She would then explain that we really wanted them to make a counteroffer. Then we would buy one of the houses; there would be no further negotiations.

The realtor asked, “What if they both accept the offer?” I cocked my head, looked at her, and then she grinned and said, “I guess both of us would make some money then.” She got it.

REAL ESTATE AGENT SENTENCED, GETS 15 YEARS!

Sentenced: Jim Silvery

A Silicon Valley real estate agent received a 15-year prison sentence this week for using a home-loan Ponzi scheme to scam friends and family out of more than $2 million, which she spent on luxuries such as fancy cars, expensive furniture and designer clothes, reported the San Jose Mercury News.

Jill Marie Silvey, of San Jose, Calif., was facing more than 30 years in prison after being charged with 44 felony counts across 14 fraudulent loans -- as well as charges of elder abuse since some of the victims were past age 65. Her sentence includes paying restitution to her victims.

Prosecutors say the 51-year-old Silvey convinced more than 20 investors to entrust their money to her for loans to homeowners -- in return for monthly interest payments paid by the homeowners. The short-term loans were supposed to be secured by the homes, however, the homeowners never received the loans and did not even know of them. All the transactions were fictitious, as Silvey forged the names of real homeowners to create fake loan documents and deeds.

7 killed, 10 injured As Building Collapses In Lagos

The collapsed site being cleared

The death toll in the collapsed three-story building located at Olota Street, off Herbert Macaulay Way, Ebute Metta, Lagos has risen to seven.

Seven others have been rescued from the rumble of the three-story building which collapsed early Thursday morning.

Confirming this, the spokesman of the National Emergency management Agency (NEMA), Ibrahim Farinloye, explained that the incident occurred at about 2.35 am, trapping 10 people.

He also confirmed that seven people have been rescued so far, while operations are continuing to rescue the remaining victims.

Eyewitness accounts claim occupants of the building heard some sounds in the building around 1am, prompting all of them to evacuate after noticing some cracks on the wall of the building.

They returned into the building at about 2am, only for the entire structure to collapse shortly after.

The NEMA official added that seven people have been rescued so far, while operations by the police, men of the state fire service and volunteers are continuing to rescue the remaining victims.

Source: Channelstv

Conversation with a real estate millionaire

Abiodun Doherty

By Abiodun Doherty 
(abiodundoherty@yahoo.com)

We have gone through several principles on real estate investments and answered several questions and enquiries from ardent readers of this column. But it may be even more instructive to share one of several conversations that I have had with a real estate millionaire that has helped me tremendously.

I have discovered the truth of the saying that an ounce of example is worth a pound of precepts. Permit me to extract the basic principles of this particular conversation and to protect the privacy of this individual who would also prefer his name not to be mentioned.

Rule 1: Have a good source of income. This particular real estate investor started several years ago just a few years after the independence of Nigeria by exporting certain agricultural produce. He poured himself into building this business and was later joined by a few other partners. The business flourished and provided him with the regular stream of income with which he started investing in real estate.

This real estate millionaire believes in hard work and entrepreneurship. He believes that many of the youths of today will do better if they learn to walk before attempting to fly. He believes that if you are willing to serve others faithfully in their business, you’ll do wonderfully well in yours when you eventually start.

The lesson for us all in this is that real estate investment requires seed capital and to have those initial seed capital you must have earning power, you must have a means of income. You cannot put up a solid structure without a solid foundation. So, for all would be investors, first learn a skill or profession that will get you a job or start a business that you can grow and that will provide you with regular income.

Rule 2: Start saving and start investing in real estate in your own little way. Our real estate millionaire started by buying land in an area that was then a “jungle’’ but is now one of the commercial nerve centres of Lagos. He stated that it was not easy buying some of those properties then. He said he made buying real estate one of his pastimes.

He did not start buying properties in the high brow areas of the time because he could not afford them. According to him, start where you are and with what you have. If all you can afford is a parcel of land in the outskirt of town by all means start there rather than not starting at all.

Nigerian Developer Set to Build Africa's Next Giant City

LAGOS, Nigeria—Africa's cities are running out of land, prompting a real-estate developer here to erect what might be Africa's ritziest district on a beach long known as a haven for day laborers and beer tipplers.

Building into the Sea

Gaining Land from Sea

Developer Gilbert Chagoury, who has a gallery in the Louvre named after him, is developing Eko Atlantic, a city for 250,000 wealthy Nigerians on a landfill outside of Lagos. See photos of the project.

The shacks that crowded the shoreline called Bar Beach are gone, replaced by construction tents. Families who squatted here were evicted. For the past four years, a Lebanese-Nigerian property developer has hosed sand into the ocean, creating new land for planned jogging paths, yacht jetties and condominiums with helipads for 250,000 opulent Nigerians.

The new Eko Atlantic township is emblematic of a booming business in Africa in which developers build walled-off cities for the very rich on a continent that is still the world's poorest.

Developer Gilbert Chagoury, founder of Nigeria's Chagoury Group, is the epitome of Africa's moneyed class: Aside from a friendship with Bill Clinton, whose 1996 presidential campaign he helped fund, Mr. Chagoury boasts an ambassadorship from St. Lucia to the Vatican and a gallery in the Louvre named after him and his wife, both contributors.

Flush with funding from French banks that are enticed by Africa's rapid growth, the 67-year-old Mr. Chagoury is aiming to cap his career with the most colossal real-estate project in West Africa.

"This is going to be the equivalent of Champs Élysées in Paris or Fifth Avenue in New York," says David Frame, managing director of South EnergX, a construction unit of Chagoury Group. He was standing on a gravel road that will be paved into an eight-lane boulevard, ending at a gated exit into the rest of Lagos.

Africa has the world's fastest-growing cities, according to the United Nations. Its current urban population of 450 million is expected to triple in the next four decades.

As vacant land vanishes in African cities, foreign investors are responding with the creation of new cities out of forests, grasslands and landfill. Investors expect to wring big profits from offering Africa's wealthy places to live, work and shop away from the crumbling infrastructure and squalor of old cities.

But those projects have come under fire from critics who point out that they will in no way alleviate the housing crisis hitting the majority of the population. In Lagos, few will be able to afford Eko Atlantic's glass tower condos.

Eko Atlantic: The Future

Meanwhile, some of these gargantuan projects are struggling. Renaissance Capital Financial Holdings Ltd. of Moscow plans to build a city for 62,000 people on a coffee farm outside Nairobi, Kenya, and a similar-size project on a pepper field near Ghana's capital of Accra.

The coffee farm in Kenya is still just that, as Renaissance works out a dispute with shareholders. The project in Ghana is mired in a disagreement between local chiefs over who owns the pepper field.

China International Trust and Investment Corp. built a $3.5 billion city for 500,000 people near Angola's capital, Luanda. The suburb opened in 2011 but remains a ghost town, as the government strains to sell the $200,000 condos to a population whose per-capita income is $6,000 a year.