In late July, a government minister stood in front of a room of developers, investors, and housing officials in Abuja and said something most of the industry hasn’t fully absorbed yet: Nigeria is about to make escrow accounts mandatory for every off-plan property sale in the country.
Not optional. Not a courtesy some developers offer to build trust. Mandatory.
Here’s what’s actually happening, what it means, and why it matters most for anyone transacting in the next few months, before the rule exists to protect them.
The Numbers Behind the Push
Nigeria’s real estate and construction sectors contributed more than ₦77 trillion to the economy in 2025. Real estate alone accounts for roughly 13.4% of GDP, about ₦41 trillion, according to figures cited by the Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Engr. Dr. Muttaqha Rabe Darma, at the BusinessDay Abuja Real Estate Conference 2026.
That scale is exactly why the current lack of regulation has become impossible to ignore. Since 1974, Nigeria has recorded more than 650 building collapses and over 1,600 deaths. Darma’s own framing of that number was blunt: “Those are not figures. They are funerals.”
Add to that the volume of Nigerians who have lost life savings to unlicensed developers selling off-plan units with no legal requirement to protect buyer funds, and the case for reform writes itself.
What the Policy Actually Proposes
The Ministry is developing what it’s calling the National Housing and Built Environment Regulation Policy, built on six pillars:
The proposal also recommends establishing a National Housing Industry Regulatory Commission to oversee enforcement, the kind of dedicated regulatory body the sector has operated without despite its size.
The specific mechanism that matters most for buyers: under the proposed reforms, developers would no longer be permitted to market or sell housing units off-plan without first obtaining a licence and securing buyers’ payments in a regulated escrow account. Money released against verified construction milestones, not against a signature and a sales pitch.
Why Dubai Keeps Coming Up
Darma referenced Dubai’s experience directly, and it’s worth understanding why. Dubai introduced compulsory escrow requirements for off-plan sales in 2007, alongside licensing for developers and agents through a dedicated regulatory authority. The market’s response wasn’t smaller. It was bigger and more liquid than before: in 2025 alone, Dubai recorded over 270,000 property transactions worth approximately $250 billion.
The lesson the Ministry is drawing isn’t subtle. Regulation didn’t shrink Dubai’s real estate market. It gave institutional and international capital a reason to trust it at a scale that unregulated markets can’t attract. As Darma put it during the process, “The difference is trust, and trust is manufactured by regulation.”
Where the Policy Stands Right Now
This is the part that matters most for how you act on this information: the policy is not law. It has moved through a stakeholders’ validation workshop in Abuja and is headed toward submission to the Federal Executive Council. That’s meaningful progress for a regulatory framework of this scope, but it is still a proposal, not an enacted rule.
That distinction changes what “acting on this” should actually look like.
What This Means If You’re Transacting Right Now
If you’re actively buying off-plan this quarter, the honest takeaway isn’t “wait for the law to pass.” It’s the opposite: ask for escrow now, as a condition of the deal, before it’s a legal requirement rather than a negotiating point. Developers who have already structured their off-plan sales around escrow are signaling something important about how they’ll operate once this becomes mandatory. Developers who haven’t will eventually have to adapt, possibly mid-transaction, possibly at your expense in the interim.
If you’re planning further out, the move is different: watch this policy’s progress toward the Federal Executive Council. Once it passes, and industry momentum behind it suggests it likely will in some form, it becomes something you can cite directly in negotiations, not just something you’re asking a developer to consider as good practice.
Why This Validates a Standard, Not Just a News Story
At Brick & Click Realty, every off-plan transaction we structure already runs on staged, milestone-linked escrow. Not because a law required it. Because a lump-sum deposit handing 100% of the leverage to a developer for the duration of a multi-year build was never a risk we were willing to ask a client to accept.
What’s changing isn’t our standard. It’s that the standard is about to become the law.
That’s not a small distinction. It means the buyers who have been asking for escrow, sometimes against resistance from developers who found it inconvenient, are about to be proven right by federal policy. And it means the developers who resisted it are the ones with the least time to adapt.
If you’re underwriting an off-plan purchase this quarter, that’s the conversation to have before you sign anything, not after.
Brick & Click Realty. Lagos luxury real estate, sold with data.
Sources referenced: Minister of Housing and Urban Development Engr. Dr. Muttaqha Rabe Darma, remarks at the BusinessDay Abuja Real Estate Conference 2026 and the Stakeholders’ Validation Workshop on the National Housing Data Programme and Regulation of the Built Environment, Abuja, July 2026. Figures corroborated across Nairametrics, The Punch, Vanguard, The Guardian Nigeria, ThisDay, and the Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation.
A few notes on how this was built:
I included a sources line at the bottom since this article makes specific factual and statistical claims. If you’d rather not include it on LinkedIn (some brands prefer a cleaner read without attribution lines), I can drop it, the facts themselves don’t change either way.
