Ask a Lagos resident what makes a good address and you'll rarely hear about the building. You'll hear whether the road floods in July, how long it takes to get to Victoria Island at 7:30 in the morning, whether the estate has its own water supply, and how many hours a day the power stays on. Estate agents talk about finishes. The people who live there talk about the city around them.

It sounds obvious, but the industry still gets this backwards. Too much African real estate is designed, marketed and valued as though the building were the product. It isn't. The product is access: to work, to schools, to clean water, to reliable electricity, to a road that stays passable in the rainy season. The building gives that access a physical form, and not much more.

What investors are really buying

A 2017 World Bank study of African cities made a point that still applies. Many African cities, it argued, are "closed" to the world: crowded, disconnected and expensive for households and firms alike. Infrastructure and structural investment have not kept pace with population growth, so people and buildings end up concentrated without the connections that make that concentration productive. Workers cannot easily reach jobs. Firms cannot easily reach each other. Density arrives before the benefits of density do.

For a developer, this changes what due diligence means. The usual feasibility study asks about land cost, construction cost, achievable rent and absorption. Those questions matter. But in a city where the public networks are incomplete, some of the most important questions sit outside the site boundary:

• Where does the water come from, and who pays when the borehole fails?

• What is the realistic daily power supply, and what does it cost to fill the gap?

• How does the site drain, and where does that water go next?

• What does a resident's commute look like on a bad day, not a good one?

Each answer turns into money. A development that relies on diesel generation carries an operating cost that residents feel every month and buyers eventually price in. A site that floods loses more than a few days of access. It picks up a reputation, and reputations stick to addresses for years.

The private burden of public gaps

When infrastructure is missing, developers usually fill the gap themselves. Estates drill boreholes, install treatment plants, build private roads, run generators and hire their own security. In many Lagos neighbourhoods, a gated development operates like a small municipality.

This is sometimes necessary, and a developer who ignores it is being naive. But it has consequences. Private provision is expensive, and those costs pass through to service charges, which push homes further from the households who need them most. It is also fragile: a private water system is only as good as the maintenance budget behind it. And it breaks the city into islands, each one serviced inside its walls and cut off from the streets outside.

The World Bank's diagnostic work on Lagos describes the city's challenges as linked: housing, infrastructure, land administration and urban finance pull on one another. A developer cannot solve that system alone. A developer can decide whether to work with it or around it.

Building with the city, not against it

What does it look like to put infrastructure first in practice?

It starts with site selection. A slightly more expensive plot near a functioning transport corridor may outperform a cheaper one that depends on a road that has been "planned" for a decade. Land is a one-time cost. A bad location keeps costing the residents and the owner for as long as the building stands.

It continues with design. Buildings can reduce their dependence on failing networks: by orienting for natural ventilation, harvesting rainwater, managing stormwater on site and cutting energy demand before sizing backup systems. These choices are less glamorous than a rooftop pool. They are also the ones residents notice every single day.

And it extends to partnership. The arrival of mass transit in Lagos shows how quickly public investment can change the value of land near it. Developers who understand where public money is going, and who engage early with the agencies spending it, are better placed to build projects that strengthen those investments instead of free-riding on them.

A different starting question

The conventional development brief begins with the question, "What can we build here?" A better one is, "What does this place need to work, and what part of that can this project provide?"

That question is harder. It pushes a developer to look at drainage maps before marketing plans, and to spend time with utility providers before architects. But it produces projects that hold their value because they are useful, not because a brochure said they were premium.

At Terra Vista Developmet, we start from a simple belief: the city is the real estate. A building can only be as good as the place it connects people to. Our work begins there.

Sources

1. World Bank, Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World, 2017.

2. Cities Alliance, Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World.

3. World Bank, Lagos Diagnostic Study and Pathway for Transformation, 2023. model, they were too invested to pull back.