Hunting for the perfect home is often like a treasure hunt to me. You have to search for days, weeks or months to find your perfect taste. So recently, we’ve been contemplating renewing our rent and have been searching for a house through publications online.
There’s quite a number of ways to find a home, although it is easier to go through an agent even though they require some fees. I have realized that they have a network of other agents which could make your search easier even if your agent doesn’t personally have the kind of home you need. He/she could ask other agents in their network to get your desired home. Some agents charge for inspection fee(N2,000) which is paid per apartment visit, while others just charge a flat rate (5,000-20,000) to search for a good home.
Yesterday though, I saw a nice home on Facebook with a fairly affordable price that was almost too good to be true. It was a three bedroom home for a rent of N400,000($500) per annum. It was crazy cheap! And my husband and I set out to check it out.
The first thing we noticed was that the house was far from the road, and unfortunately, we didn’t drive to the said place. It was difficult to get to the house and we eventually had to share one commercial bike to the place. We kept moving farther away from the busy road and i even began to get scared hoping that we were not about to get kidnapped by the bike man( lots of crazy things happen in Kaduna state). We eventually got to the home though, It was a beautiful home just like the ad had described and thankfully, this agent did not ask for any form pf payment from us. I figured it was because of the location of the home and many people must have been here already, so taking a fee for a home in a remote and insecure place might seem almost fraudulent.
After seeing the home, we went out to ask a few people around about the security in the community and like we expected, there had been NINE incidents of kidnappings in that community and we learned that the origins home owners fled the insecurity to move to Abuja and instantly, that explained the ridiculously cheap price for that home, because an average home like that should cost between (N700,000 to N2,000,000)
If we were to rent that home, the cost of the home would certainly not be 400,000 but the cost of the bad road on our car, the cost of insecurity, which can be as high as N100,000,000 to save one life. We considered this in addition to the many other hood factors like electricity which is fairly constant and the big soace behind the house which i could use for a garden.
But safety is more valuable than the above so we let the house go. We will be renewing our rent again and have given up the search for a home. For me, the cost of renting a home goes beyond the price and covers important things like availability of light, so you dont have to spend much on fuel ( except your home is solar-powered), safety, access to basic things like a pharmacy and market, availability of water and many other things that are important.
House-hunting is really like a treasure hunt and might require patience. But when you get the perfect home, it all becomes worth it.
All pictures are from Sunom Real Estate Agents Facebook Group