NMRC Promises to Supply Housing Information

In an effort to ease the nation’s housing shortage, the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company has reiterated its commitment to provide decision-makers with interim housing data.
This was said recently in Abuja during the formation of a new joint steering group on housing data by NMRC CEO Kehinde Ogundimu.
Ogundimu proposed that NMRC provide temporary solutions while the National Data Center was being created in order to guarantee the continuity of data provision.

“If there are any interim measures that are needed, maybe a temporary data portal or something, NMRC can provide that while we are providing one that will be substantive and robust for the entire nation,” Ogundimu stated.

“We need to explore, gather all the details from where we can gather them, put them in the database, and then begin to refine them by the analysis that we make of such data,” he said, emphasizing the vital necessity for thorough and trustworthy housing data.

Ogundimu was upbeat about the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development’s new portal and system, which are meant to make data collecting and analysis more efficient.

“I am so happy that the ministers are providing all the information they have been able to glean from this new system, the portal that they have. It will help in decision-making, both in policy decisions and in financial decisions, project planning, and so many other things,” he added.

The Minister of Housing and Urban Development was reassured by the initiative to unify housing statistics that NMRC is committed to providing trustworthy and dependable information, which is important for making informed decisions across diverse Ogundimu.

“The task before us is enormous, and Honorable Minister, we assure you that we will do all we can to deliver to the best of our ability and to put forth something that will be credible, reliable and that people can use to make informed decisions,” he emphasised.

According to Ogundimu, the National Population Commission already holds significant data that could contribute to this effort.

“I am also happy to report that in my interactions with the population commission, they have most of this data. The number of houses in Nigeria is about 66 million. The habitable ones are maybe something like 40 million. The data is here. So I think you now bringing all of us together will help us just to bring this to the fore quickly and get data that is reliable,” Ogundimu explained.

He emphasized the committee’s commitment to sticking to the schedule and mentioned that activities may be completed simultaneously to speed up the process.

“We will look at the timeline. As rightly noted, sir, even though we said 12 months, some of these things can overlap. We can run them concurrently. So we will shorten the timeline for the deliverable,” he said.

“The issue of housing development is a significant challenge facing our country,” said Marcus Ogunbiyi, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. The advancement of home development plans has been impeded by the deficiency of efficient strategies and data.

He mentioned that the committee’s purview encompassed the establishment of a national center for housing development, the construction of channels for obtaining data, and the creation of channels for distributing data to financial markets.

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this committee, said Ogunbiyi. This is an important project that ought to have been started sooner.