ABSTRACT

Shelter has been universally accepted as the second most important essential human need after food. Housing in all its ramifications is more than mere shelter since it embraces all the social services and utilities that go to make a community or neighbourhood liveable environment. Efficient housing design is becoming increasingly imperative in Nigerian urban centres; this is because housing is an essential and fundamental component of the overall land use activities in both rural and urban centres. Besides, it has a tremendous positive influence on the health, safety and welfare (economic and social) of residents of any community. A country where the per capital income is at its lowest point, a low-income environment explains the low take home pay, which does not permit savings. It follows that where the poor manages to feed and may be, cloth himself and members of his family, he may never be able to pay his rents or own a house of his own. The study is an attempt to uncover the various constraints and prospects of management of residential properties in Nigeria using Benin metropolis as a case study. Management of residential properties, not only covers rent collection, repairs and maintenance but also other aspects of good management. The importance of management of residential properties has become so technical that the knowledge and services of competent property managers are required to perform the task. The research adopted case study and serve research methods. The study was based on Benin metropolis. The study made use of questionare as a way of getting required data from the respondents, which are the estate survey and valuation firms In Benin city, a total of 56 questionaires where administers to the various estate surveying firms and 52 where recovered representing 92% of the distributed questionaires,. Being a survey design that tested the correctness of the observed frequency of responses, percentage distribution was initially used to describe the pattern of responses of the participants, Descriptive research survey design was adopted in building up this project work. The choice of this research design is considered appropriate because of its advantages of identifying attributes of a large population from a group of individuals, The objective one and two was analyzed using frequency tables while objective three and four was analyzed using the means core from 5 point likert score to test the statistical significance of the observation.

The research concluded that property management is as important as property development as the lack of it eventually diminishes the national housing stock, apart from constituting a waste of scare economic resources.