Disbursements have reached 27 states across all six geopolitical zones, with the heaviest concentration in Lagos and Abuja, and lending recorded in Ogun, Oyo, Enugu, Kano and Kaduna among others. The average borrower is 43 years old. Adekunbi said the fastest completed transaction took under three weeks.
Why 9.75 percent is the story
The Central Bank of Nigeria's Monetary Policy Committee retained the Monetary Policy Rate at 26.5 percent at its July 2026 meeting, voting unanimously to hold. Commercial lending prices off that benchmark. A 20-year fixed mortgage at 9.75 percent sits far below the policy rate, which means the product is not a market-priced loan. It is a subsidised instrument funded through a government-anchored vehicle, and its availability is a function of how much capital the fund has raised rather than of borrower demand.
That distinction matters for anyone planning around it. NGN 140 billion against a NGN 1 trillion target, with NGN 250 billion raised in the first tranche, indicates the programme is deploying its existing capital rather than facing a shortage of applicants. Sani Yakubu, MREIF national coordinator at MOFI, framed the gap it is meant to address: Nigeria needs roughly 700,000 housing units a year against current delivery of about 100,000.
The mechanism
MREIF sits under the Ministry of Finance Incorporated. FirstBank is the distribution partner for mortgages, with Vetiva Capital Management as financial adviser, STL Trustees as trustee and First Nominees as nominee. A borrower applies through the partner bank rather than to the fund directly.
Two eligibility conditions govern most outcomes. The first is title. The property must carry valid land title and clear ownership, which in practice means a Certificate of Occupancy or a properly perfected Deed of Assignment with Governor's Consent, and no encumbrance on the parcel. Applications fail here more often than on affordability.
The second is age and tenor. Mortgages are structured to run to retirement at 60, with exceptions for judges and lecturers whose statutory retirement ages differ. At an average applicant age of 43, that caps most borrowers well below the headline 20-year tenor, and a 17-year loan at 9.75 percent carries a materially higher monthly payment than a 20-year one. Pension contributors can draw up to 25 percent of their Retirement Savings Account balance toward the equity contribution.
What it means for a diaspora buyer
Eligibility for Nigerians abroad is the operative change in this disclosure. A diaspora buyer with proper documentation can access a naira-denominated fixed-rate mortgage at 9.75 percent, which alters the calculation that has pushed most diaspora purchases into outright cash payment. Financing a Lagos or Abuja purchase rather than paying cash frees capital and leaves the borrower with a fixed naira liability against a naira asset, which is a different currency position from remitting the full purchase price in dollars or pounds.
The constraint is the same one that governs every diaspora purchase in Nigeria: title. A property with a defective root of title, an unperfected assignment or a family land dispute behind it will not clear the fund's underwriting, and no rate advantage compensates for that. The documentation work has to be done before an application, not during it.
The NGN 100 million loan ceiling and the 10 percent minimum equity define the practical envelope. On a NGN 111 million purchase, a borrower contributing the minimum equity reaches the loan cap.
Context
Nigeria's mortgage market is small relative to the size of its housing deficit, and formal mortgage penetration has been constrained for years by the cost of funds, the difficulty of perfecting title, and the absence of long-tenor fixed-rate products. The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and the National Housing Fund have operated in this space with limited scale. MREIF is the largest attempt to date to build a fixed-rate mortgage market on a government balance sheet, and the reform track around it includes work on a national land registry intended to make title verification faster.
Related reading: why the national land registry project matters to diaspora buyers, Nigerian property titles explained, and the diaspora buying process step by step.
