By Angela Lovely
If they haven’t chickened out after reading the warnings from the UK Foreign Office, a delegation of estate agents would have landed in Nigeria and will this week be sipping drinks and pressing the flesh with some of the African state’s wealthiest people.
While bombs go off in the north of the country and millions are living in crushing poverty, the coastal city of Lagos is playing host for a couple of days to some salesmen offering to ease the creaking bank accounts of some of Nigeria’s elite.
The Estates Gazette reports that Exemplar is intending to flog some of the remaining flats at Fitzroy Place to Nigerian investors:
Mark Collins, chairman of residential at CBRE, said a double-digit batch of the luxury apartments at the £750m development by Aviva, Exemplar and Kaupthing, have just sold, leaving only 50 remaining.
Collins will now visit Nigeria to market the remaining assets after companies such as Berkeley proved successful in selling in the African country.
Only around 30% of the homes have been sold to UK buyers.
Another report says the sales team will be in Lagos on 18 and 19 March before moving on to the capital city Abuja and its Transcorp Hilton Hotel for an exclusive Africa launch from 21 to 22 March.
Every time these guys go somewhere in the world the price of the flats goes up. The most expensive apartment has risen from £8,500,000 in the summer last year to today’s price of £14,000,000.
There’s a lot of money sloshing about here and Fitzrovia News editors are getting a little confused with all the zeros.
Savills are also reported to be raking it in:
The estate agent Savills’ 25,000 staff worldwide are set to share more than £100m in bonuses this year after the property consultant’s profits jumped.
And where’s the money coming from?
Overseas demand for new homes in the capital is such that Savills enjoyed a huge rush of sales for flats at Fitzroy Place, on the site of the former Middlesex Hospital in central London, in just one weekend of marketing in Hong Kong and Singapore.
No doubt CBRE are in Nigeria after UK business secretary Vince Cable paved the way for British business last October. Cable knows a thing or two about Nigeria and its economy from his work for Shell as its chief economist. Yet he remains rather coy about this.
Nigeria has been booming in recent years: growth is more than 6 percent. Yet one in four people in Nigeria don’t have enough to eat.
Is it the rich who are paying for these expensive flats in Fitzrovia, or is it the poor?
Apparently Brazil is the next destination on the Fitzroy Place sales tour. I hope Theresa May is informed about this.
I am still confused by these prices and wonder whether Fitzrovia will end up a ghost town with all this overseas investment; especially as the UK £ collapses and wages shrink: what British citizen will be able to afford to live here?
I could save Exemplar a fortune in high travel costs to Nigeria, as I get daily emails from Nigeria offering me millions of pounds for doing nothing but sharing my bank account details. I will forward them on to them.
We are becoming a safe haven for all the money stolen by corrupt politicians and businessmen in bandit countries like Nigeria. We ought to be ashamed.
Why are developments always investments on not homes !?! Elitist planning while normal folk are left to rent. Rubbish