Haven Homes Lagos: The Richmond Pearl Service Charge Case and the Public Record

Haven Homes has completed and handed over estates in Lagos, and it also spent much of the first half of 2024 in the High Court of Lagos State defending an injunction obtained by 155 of its own purchasers. Both statements are documented. Anyone searching the company's name is usually trying to work out which one matters more, and the honest answer is that they are about different things: one is a construction record, the other is a dispute about what a buyer owes after the building is finished.

Before anything else, a disambiguation, because the search results for this company name are a mess. The Lagos developer at thehavenhomes.com is unrelated to Haven Homes LLC, the modular housebuilder in Pennsylvania, to Brown Haven Homes in Georgia, to Haven Homes on the Isle of Man, or to Haven Homes Realty, a separate Nigerian business on a different domain. Complaints, reviews and ratings attached to any of those tell you nothing about the Lagos company.

What the company is

Haven Homes describes itself as the real estate arm of Haven Global Resources Limited and states on its own site that it has been building since 2006. Court filings reported by The Guardian Nigeria name Haven Global Resources Limited as the corporate defendant, operating in Lagos and Atlanta, which corroborates the parent entity independently.

Founder and chief executive Tayo Sonuga, whose name appears in the 2024 court filings as Sotayo Sonuga, told Vanguard Allure in November 2019 that he returned to Nigeria from the UK, founded the business in 2006 and completed his first property in Magodo in 2007. In December 2024, BusinessDay named Ufuoma Ilesanmi as managing director and Babajide Olowu as technical director, with Sonuga as CEO. THISDAY reported in August 2025 that Ilesanmi had been appointed managing director in December 2024 after around fourteen years with the company.

That is the extent of the verifiable corporate picture, and it is thinner than a two-decade track record would suggest. No Corporate Affairs Commission record for the company could be verified from a primary source. An RC number appears on the property portal Propsult and nowhere else, which is not enough to print as fact. No Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority registration, no shareholder list, no board of directors and no company secretary could be located. The company's own about page publishes no registration number and no registered address, and lists four staff names, of which one is the managing director and the other three appear to be unedited website template placeholders rather than staff.

None of that is evidence of wrongdoing. Nigerian corporate records are genuinely hard to search from outside the CAC's paid portal, and plenty of legitimate firms publish nothing. It does mean a buyer cannot verify this developer from the open web and has to pay for a CAC search instead.

The delivery record

What is documented is real construction, reported by named outlets.

The Guardian Nigeria reported on 22 July 2019 that Haven Homes had delivered Richmond Gate Estate Phase II on the Lekki peninsula, near the fourth roundabout on the Lekki-Ajah expressway, and described Phase I as already complete. Unit counts were not given.

Richmond Pearl Estate in Lekki was still in development when Sonuga discussed it with CNBC Africa in March 2021. BusinessDay reported on 17 December 2024 that Oba Saheed Ademola Elegushi, the paramount ruler of Ikate Kingdom, had toured the estate and praised the "newly completed" multi-storey maisonette blocks. The company's own portfolio page lists all four Richmond Pearl unit types, the five-bedroom quadplex, four-bedroom townhomes and the three and two-bedroom maisonettes, as sold out.

A fourth development, Brown's Court in Ikeja GRA, is listed by Propsult as a Haven Homes project. It does not appear on the company's own current portfolio page and no completion date could be sourced.

So: estates that exist, were built, and were reported as delivered by named journalists. That answers the construction question.

The Richmond Pearl service charge case

The dispute is not about whether the buildings went up. It is about what happened at handover.

In Suit No. LD/7841/2024 before the High Court of Lagos State, purchasers at Richmond Pearl Estate sued Haven Global Resources Limited and its chief executive Sotayo Sonuga. The Guardian Nigeria reported the case on 15 February 2024. According to that report, 155 purchasers who had either paid in full or were current on their payments were billed a service charge of ₦10 million per unit, rising in some demands to ₦14 million, before they would be given possession. The purchasers argued that "a service charge cannot be for capital intensive projects like a road build," on the basis that road payment was never disclosed during the sales process, and said they were threatened with reallocation and contract termination when they queried the charges.

The company's stated defence, as reported, was force majeure: "COVID-19, EndSARS, initial Naira devaluation and other tangible economic upheavals."

Hon. Justice O. Atinuke Ipaye granted a restraining order barring the company from "re-allocating, re-selling or selling the units, flats, apartments" or transferring possession to third parties, with the matter returning on 26 February 2024. The purchasers were represented by Moyosore Onigbanjo, SAN, a former Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice of Lagos State.

P.M. News reported on 2 May 2024 that the court subsequently refused the company's application to vacate the restraining order, extended it, and rejected the company's request to bar the purchasers from speaking to the press.

Two things need saying plainly about this. First, these are interlocutory rulings on an injunction, not a final judgment. An interlocutory injunction preserves the position while a case is decided; it is not a finding that the claimants are right. Second, no final judgment or settlement in LD/7841/2024 could be located, and searches for developments after May 2024 returned nothing. The outcome is the obvious open question and the public record does not answer it. Anyone with money at stake in that estate should check the Lagos High Court registry directly rather than rely on news coverage that stops eighteen months ago.

No EFCC matter, Securities and Exchange Commission notice, consumer-protection action or regulatory sanction involving Haven Homes could be located.

What a buyer should take from this

Service charge disputes at handover are one of the most common and least anticipated failure points in Nigerian off-plan purchases, and this case is a clear illustration of the mechanics. The money was paid, the building was finished, and the disagreement was about a bill that buyers said had never been disclosed when they signed.

The protection is contractual and it has to be secured before payment, not after. Get the service charge basis in writing in the sale agreement, including whether infrastructure and road construction can be recovered through it, whether the amount can be varied, and what happens to possession if you dispute a charge. Ask whether any charge is a condition of handover. Ask what the developer's remedy is if you refuse to pay something you say was never agreed.

Bektu (https://bektu.com) records developer delivery history and the documented disputes attached to it so that these questions get asked before the money moves, and the company's own listing is at https://bektu.com/companies/haven-homes.

For the wider checks, our guide to verifying a Nigerian property developer before buying off-plan covers what to demand at contract stage, and the piece on why a good website is not due diligence explains why a polished site proves nothing either way. If you are buying anywhere on the Lekki peninsula, the guide to Lekki Phase 1 developers sets the local context.