Olympia Estate: A place with its ambience

Its stylish houses easily attract passersby and motorists. The estate has in all, 44 units of housing: 16 three-bedroom flats, 16 four-bedroom semi-detached houses and 12 three-bedroom terrace houses. Our reporter was told that all units had been sold. Each house comes with a BQ en suite, attached to it. All rooms are en suite. […]

Its stylish houses easily attract passersby and motorists. The estate has in all, 44 units of housing: 16 three-bedroom flats, 16 four-bedroom semi-detached houses and 12 three-bedroom terrace houses. Our reporter was told that all units had been sold. Each house comes with a BQ en suite, attached to it. All rooms are en suite.
The semi-detached houses which are two in a building – four bedrooms with one-room BQ goes for N65 million. The terraces go for N60 million and the flats are N35 million.
The place has a swimming pool and a lawn tennis court. There is a generous landscaping – there are a lot of greens – children play area all green.
The perimeter is covered by CCTV. As part of security checks, one cannot just go into the estate. Visitors must be cleared at the gate. There is communication facility between the gatemen and residents.
There is a central generator, yet there are individual generators for subscribers. This apparently poses problem to the serenity of the place.  The shrewd Tunji Adeniran, a builder and a fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Building (NIoB) who is the proprietor of the property gives reasons individual houses have their power sources: “We certainly wished we didn’t put all those generators in place but we’re all conversant with what our power situation is. That has made it imperative for us to have to do that.
“We again had to consider the cost of running a generator and the convenience of residents. Typically we provided the generated that can provide power to the entire estate – one 500kva capacity generator.
“But we do know the cost of running that generator is high in terms of diesel consumption per hour of running. We want to ensure that the costs as much as possible are pocket friendly for subscribers.
“We had to look at options of when there are down times as there will be when half of the estate’s residents has gone to work. Running a 500kva generator at such a time is going to be totally inefficient cost wise for the residents.
“What we then did was to provide a 30kva generator for each of the houses which they can run at such down times and it’s a lot more pocket friendly for them.
“A couple of things were achieved. One is you don’t pay for what you don’t consume in that respect. If they were all running on the 500kva when 80 percent was out, it’s going to be difficult to get 20 percent to pay the cost of running it.
“We’re hoping that when residents have taken charge fully, they’ll agree on what times they run the big generator. At those times they’ll be able to reach an agreement and enforce to say once the big generator is running, no small generators are allowed to run anywhere and that takes the noise away.”

Costly asphalt surfacing
The entire estate has asphalt roads and the walkways are paved. But this was not the intention of the builder.
Adeniran explains, “We had the option to do interlocking building stones for the drive way but in the process of interactions and consultations with our subscribers, people expressed opinion that for safety of children who will want to play, ride the bicycle, go on roller skate, asphalt road is better.
“It cost us a lot more but it’s one of the things we chose to do to ensure that we give our customers the kind of satisfaction living in here.”
Water runs continuously. The place is connected to the public water supply. Generally, water supply in the area is good so the borehole sunk in the estate is hardly put to use. The manager of the estate calls the borehole “back up”.
The tap flows with good pressure in tandem with the internal designs in the estate blending with the gravity there. There is underground water drainage to take care of storm water drain. There is the central sewage underground.   

How does it feel owning a property like this?
Tunji responds, “There’s a sense of fulfillment, satisfaction. I remember about 20 months ago, when we came here, it was all bush, the cashew trees and all of that. But 20 months down the line, it has become a place where people can live and be happy.
“There is the sense of satisfaction that we’re meeting the needs of people, taking the trouble off people, going to look for land, getting planning approval, worry about construction, all sorts of things.
“The other thing is we’ve tried to create what I think is standard of sorts. We’ve had people come here say ‘you’re not the typical Abuja developer’. They look at the quality of materials we’ve used, they look at the quality of our construction and attest to the fact that we’re different.
“Owners of the houses will be proud to say, ‘I live in Olympia Estate’. We’re also expecting that six months, one year when the trees have blossomed and the grasses and shrubs have all grown, we’ll see a situation that when here, you may forget a while that you’re in Nigeria.”
Land for this project was procured in April 2012. Planning approvals were processed and work on site commenced in Nov. 2012. In a year, the buildings were done with; left with external works and finishing up.
On purchase, registerable titles are issued. Whoever buys is given a deed of assignment. Surveys are done for each of the houses such that each house has a unique definition with survey registerable at Abuja Geographic Information Systems (AGIS) for titles.