The call came on a Tuesday morning, which is the kind of detail that sounds irrelevant until you consider that the man calling had just watched a Caterpillar excavator reverse into the building where his family had been sleeping the night before. He was not hysterical. That surprised me. His voice had the particular flatness of someone who has already spent their emotion and is now just trying to understand what happened to them. He said: Lukmon, I have the receipt. I have everything. And I could hear in the way he said it that he already knew the receipt was not going to be enough.
His name is Remi. He lives in Surulere, which is not my usual corridor, but Lagos has a way of sending you stories that do not respect geography. I have been covering Ajah and the Lekki axis long enough to know that what happens in Surulere today is a rehearsal for what will happen somewhere behind Abraham Adesanya roundabout in two years, when the land values shift again and a landlord who has been patient suddenly decides he has been patient long enough.
Remi and four other tenants in his compound had paid, between them, somewhere close to six million naira in rent. Two years upfront, most of them. One woman had paid for three. The landlord had collected every kobo, written receipts on a printed letterhead that looked serious, and renewed two of the tenancies as recently as eight months ago. Then a developer arrived. A fence went up around the property on a Thursday. By the following Monday, the Caterpillar was there.
The landlord’s position, communicated through a lawyer’s letter that arrived after the excavator, was that the tenants had been given notice. There was a notice. It existed on paper. Whether it was properly served, whether the timeframe was legal, whether any of this was done in accordance with the Lagos State Tenancy Law — these are the questions that a magistrate will eventually answer, slowly, while Remi and his neighbours figure out where to sleep.
Here is the part that changed something in my thinking. I asked Remi whether anyone had checked the property’s title documents before they paid. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said the agent had shown them a C of O. I asked whether they had seen the actual document or a photocopy. Another pause. A photocopy, he said. I asked whether they had taken it to a lawyer to verify. And the pause that came after that question told me everything.
This is not Remi’s failure. I want to be clear about that. This is a system that has spent decades training tenants to believe that a receipt and a key are sufficient evidence of a transaction, while the people on the other side of that transaction, the landlords, the developers, the agents who collect their ten percent and grow scarce, understand perfectly well that the documentation most tenants receive offers them almost no protection when the ground shifts. The power in Lagos property has always sat with whoever controls the land title. Everything else is paper that feels real until it meets a lawyer or a bulldozer.
What I know about the Ajah corridor, from years of walking it and arguing inside it, is that the same conditions are present here. Tenants in Abraham Adesanya Estate and the estates nearby are paying significant money, often two years upfront because that is simply the culture and nobody has successfully challenged it, into arrangements where the underlying title situation of the property is something they have never verified and were never encouraged to. The agent shows you the flat. The flat is clean. There is a prepaid meter. The compound has a painted wall and a gate with a lock. You sign. You pay. You move in. And somewhere in a government office or a family estate dispute or a developer’s acquisition folder, there is a document that your tenancy agreement did not account for.
Developers in this city have become extremely sophisticated at acquiring land that is already occupied. They do it quietly, they do it legally, and they do it while the tenants sitting on that land are paying rent to someone who has already, in practical terms, sold the ground from under them. The landlord is not always a villain. Sometimes he is just a man who took an offer. The tenant is not always naive. Sometimes he simply did not know that the question to ask was not can I see the C of O but who does this C of O actually belong to and is there any encumbrance on this title.
Remi is staying with his brother in Iyana-Ipaja now. The case is with a lawyer. It will take time.
Before you pay anything for a property in this city, any property, find the title document and take it, the original or a certified true copy, to a lawyer who has no relationship with the agent or the landlord. Pay for that verification yourself. It will cost you between twenty and fifty thousand naira. It is the cheapest thing you will ever do.
Lukmon Isiaq is a Lagos-based property researcher and street-level writer who has spent years studying the Ajah corridor the way most people never bother: on foot, in compounds, and in conversation with landlords, tenants, caretakers, and estate agents who operate where the listings end and the real story begins.
He is not a property developer. He is not a real estate marketer. He is the person you call before you sign anything. The one who has personally walked flood-prone streets after October rain, argued with agents over undisclosed charges, and documented how the Lagos housing market actually works for ordinary Nigerians trying to make serious decisions with serious money.
His writing on Abraham Adesanya Estate Lekki Ajah covers the Ajah corridor, Ikota Villa, Ajao Estate, Ogudu GRA, and the wider Lekki property market with one consistent standard: the honest version, not the brochure version.
He understands the gap between what a listing promises and what a tenant discovers on their first rainy season.
