Investors jittery over viability of Eko Atlantic City project

Investors in the Eko Atlantic Project are increasingly becoming anxious over recouping their investment following failure to attract large and rewarding patronage from luxury seeking individuals as earlier projected, National Daily has gathered.

Findings revealed that individual patrons who had made down payments for luxury apartments and offices in the futuristic city are stylishly beating a retreat and withholding the balances on their initial payments.

According to an insider, the declining state of the economy, depreciation in value of the naira and reduction in spending power of existing patrons and potential ones have impacted negatively on the pace of development of the luxury business and residential estate.

National Daily gathered from a reliable source that many of those who have committed some financial resources into it are running from pillar to post to sell their allotment, an exercise largely executed in futility, as prospective buyers also nurse fears besides the fact that ownership of such property comes at a huge cost, which they are not ready to part with due to lack of investor’s confidence in the project..

Findings revealed that a buyer who in 2015 made $500,000 down payment for 3-bedroom flat valued at $1.2million at the time did the payment with a commitment to pay up the remaining $700,000 in two instalments by last quarter of 2017.

The exponential increase in dollar value has since thrown him off balance.

The investor, it was gathered made the first instalment when one dollar was the equivalent of N150 unlike now when one dollar has more than doubled that amount at N360.

The $500,000, which was N75 million in 2015, is now N180 million, and may be devising means to raise N252 million, which is Naira equivalent of $700,000 that would have been N105 million in 2015 or forfeited the initial deposit.

All these have adversely affected the city; and critics are beginning to wonder if the city would not go the way of many other abandoned projects that litter Nigeria’s geographical landscape.

Just off the Lagos coast, the Eko Atlantic City, which is being built on an artificial island, spanning 10 kilometers.

Promotional videos depict the city as a paradise of towering buildings, housing for 250,000 people, and a central boulevard designed to match Paris’ Champs-Élysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue.

These projections have been seen to be grossly inhibited as only two skyscrapers are only standing on the expansive city while the spate of construction works on other areas have left much to be desired.

According to its developers, it is designed to arrest the ocean’s encroachment and prevent the rising sea-level from washing away thousands of peoples’ homes.