Nigeria Regulates Its Architects and Engineers. It Does Not Regulate Its Property Developers

That distinction is where buyers lose money. REDAN's own framing captures it well: a registry tells you who exists, but a regulatory system tells you who can be trusted to operate and under what standards. Nigeria, on the association's account, currently has neither in a strong form for developers.

The multiple-sale problem, explained

One of the specific harms Adeoye named is multiple land sales. This is when the same parcel is sold to two, three, or more buyers who each believe they are the sole owner. It happens because land records have historically been fragmented and slow, and because a dishonest seller can produce fresh-looking documents faster than a buyer can verify old ones.

The buyer who registers their interest first and secures Governor's Consent, the state governor's formal approval required for most land transfers under the Land Use Act of 1978, is in the strongest position. The others are left fighting in court. A diaspora buyer who paid quickly, trusted a middleman, and never registered anything is usually the most exposed of all.

Regulation would not end this overnight. But a licensed developer with a track record and something to lose behaves very differently from an anonymous operator who can dissolve one company and open another next month.

What REDAN is proposing

Adeoye called for a shared model. The Federal Government would license developers. REDAN would handle professional standards, ethics, and training. State governments would keep their existing roles over land administration, planning, and development control. He also backed a National Developers' Registry sitting on top of a proper regulatory framework, so that only competent and accountable developers can operate.

He was careful to say that credible regulation is not a threat to honest builders. His argument was the opposite. Every fraudulent operator posing as a developer damages the reputation of the genuine ones and scares away the investment the sector needs to close Nigeria's large housing deficit.

Whether the Federal Government acts on the proposal is a separate question, and reforms like this move slowly. But the diagnosis is useful to a buyer today, because it tells you exactly which risks the market has not yet fixed for you.

How to protect yourself while the gap remains

Until licensing exists, you have to be your own regulator. That means checking three things before you pay a developer anything.

Check that the developer owns or has a clear legal right to the land. Ask for the title document, then have a lawyer verify it at the state lands registry rather than accepting a photocopy. A developer selling land they do not control is the classic multiple-sale setup.

Check the planning approval. A genuine project has an approved building or layout plan from the relevant state planning authority. No approval means the buildings can later be sealed or demolished, regardless of how much you paid.

Check delivery history. Ask which projects the developer has actually finished and handed over, then verify independently rather than relying on the brochure. This is the single hardest thing to fake and the single most useful thing to know. It is also why Bektu (https://bektu.com) exists as a transparency and research platform that tracks Nigerian developer delivery history. It is not a marketplace and not a brokerage. Its purpose is to let a buyer see a developer's record of completed and abandoned projects before committing money, which is precisely the information the absent regulator does not yet provide.

REDAN's message to the government was that the debate is no longer whether developers should be regulated, but how. For buyers, the message is simpler. The safeguard that should exist is not there yet, so do the verification yourself, in full, before the deposit leaves your account.

*This article draws on Punch's 2 August 2026 report of REDAN president Oba Akintoye Adeoye's remarks at the National Housing Data Programme Workshop in Abuja.*