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Assessment of Urban Neighbourhood Factors Influencing the Values of Real Estate Investment in Nigeria

Real estate investments within and around urban areas in Nigeria, as evidence in other developing countries has shown, are plagued with litany of challenges, many of which are weighty and as such tell so much upon the cardinal goal[s] surrounding property investment and resultantly erodes the profitability anticipated by investors in the first place. Among such challenges, the factors of which this study was conducted to assess their influence upon the worth regime and value dynamics, are the neighbourhood character and general spatio-scenic physiognomy of the urbanscape of some real estate neighbourhoods, within island and mainland areas of Lagos, Nigeria. Being a quantitative research, an admixture of baseline survey and comprehensive literature search were deployed to generate a set of urban neighbourhood socio-economic, physico-environmental and human factors that are believed to affect value of real estate investments, against which perceptions were elicited through responses on a 5-point Likert scaled design. Adopting purposive and convenience non-parametric sampling techniques in distributing 112 copies of questionnaire among estate surveyors and valuers, town planners, real estate investors and real estate users, as they are germane to the issue under study, out of the 97 copies that were retrieved, which translates to 86.61% of distribution-retrieval rate, 91 copies were found to be valid, upon which regression and exploratory factor analyses, as well as item correlation weighting were performed. Establishing Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of 0.704, which is greater than 0.5 threshold and the statistical significance of p < 0.05 for Bartlett’s Sphericity Test, as well as overall average Cronbach alpha values of 0.911 for the five (5) broad constructs of 22 factor descriptive variables, the results show among other things that, physical factor with mean item score, standard deviation and total cumulative variance explained values of 3.35, 0.671 and 37.007% respectively at β = 0.385, has the greatest influence and determinate strength, while human factor with mean item score, standard deviation and total cumulative variance explained values of 3.23, 0.603 and 12.192% respectively at β = 0.296, has the least influence and determinacy, as neighbourhood factors on the values of real estate investment, respectively.  It is concluded that real estate sector remains a lead in continually driving Nigeria’s economic growth, which is premised upon evolving framework that ensures elegant urban development that eliminates ugliness that has potential of limiting full benefits from real estate development.