Seven Things to Verify Before Buying Land

I have watched people lose money on land they could stand on, walk across and photograph. That is the part nobody warns you about. The fraud is rarely in the imagination. It is in the paper, and in the gaps between the papers.

Amina came into our office one Tuesday with a folder tied with a rubber band. She is a nurse. She had saved for eleven years, and she had just paid 6.5 million naira for a plot in one of the fast-growing corridors outside the city centre. She was not crying. She was angry in the quiet way that people are angry when somebody else has already told them the bad news, and they are now looking for confirmation, or for a miracle.

She handed me the documents. An allocation letter. A receipt. A survey plan with coordinates. A deed of assignment signed by a man whose name she had never heard, transferring the land to a company that no longer existed. And a photocopy of a certificate of occupancy belonging to a different plot entirely.

Six documents. Three of them real. None of them describing the same piece of land.

"The agent said everything was complete," she told me.

Everything is always complete. Until you check.

This is the post I wish somebody had handed Amina before she paid. Seven things to verify before you buy land, in the order I check them myself.

1. Who owns it, according to the register, not the folder

The first thing to verify is not a document. It is a search result.

Every genuine title in the Federal Capital Territory has a record at AGIS, the Abuja Geographic Information Systems. The document is evidence of ownership. The record is ownership. If the two disagree, the record wins and you walk away.

Ask for a search on the plot number, the file number and the coordinates. Do it yourself, or through a lawyer you hired, not a lawyer the seller introduced. This one step is the reason I have walked away from deals that looked perfect on paper. Some of them were perfect. Most were not.

2. That the coordinates point to the land you were shown

A survey plan is a set of numbers that describes a place. Sellers know most buyers cannot read those numbers, so the plan is where a surprising amount of fraud hides.

Hire a licensed surveyor. Give him the plan and the title. Take him to the site. He must find the survey beacons, confirm that the coordinates on the paper sit on the ground where you are standing, and confirm that the plot does not overlap the neighbour's land, the access road, or a government reservation.

I have seen a man sell a beautiful plot in a well-known estate, with a genuine survey plan, for a parcel of land that was three kilometres away from where he took the buyer. The document was real. The location was a lie.

3. That the chain of ownership is complete

Land in Abuja usually reaches you through a chain: government allocation to a first allottee, a deed of assignment to a second owner, another to a third, then to the person selling to you. Every link must exist, be signed, be stamped and be registered.

A missing link is not a paperwork problem. It is a title problem. If the seller cannot show how the land moved from the government to him, he may not own what he is selling. And if his own purchase was never registered, the whole chain behind you is a set of private promises rather than enforceable rights.

4. Minister's consent on every transfer

Under the Land Use Act, land in the FCT is held under a right of occupancy, and transferring that right requires the consent of the Honourable Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. A deed of assignment without consent is an incomplete transfer.

"We will do the consent after you pay" is the most expensive sentence in Nigerian real estate. Either it is done, or you should not be paying the full price.

5. What the land is zoned for, and what you are allowed to build

Check the land use: residential, commercial, mixed use, industrial. Then check what has been approved on that specific plot. A plot approved for a bungalow will not legally carry a four-storey block, no matter what the agent promises.

Also check setbacks and road reservations. FCDA has the right to take a strip of land from the front of a plot when a road is widened or a service corridor is opened. Buy without checking and you could discover that the plot you paid for is now the road.

6. Encumbrances, meaning everything already promised to somebody else

Is the land under a mortgage? Subject to litigation? Already sold to another buyer? Inside a committed government area for a road, a rail corridor or a public project?

Double allocation is the most common form of theft in land sales, and it does not require a forged document. All it requires is a seller with easy access to a photocopier. Two buyers, one plot, both holding signed papers, both believing they own it. The register shows only one of them does.

7. That the seller is the person the documents say, and that the account matches

Verify identity. If the seller is a company, check the company at the Corporate Affairs Commission and confirm that whoever is signing has authority. Then confirm the obvious thing that people skip: the name on the receipt, the name on the deed and the name on the bank account you are paying into must all be the same.

If they are three different names, stop. If the account belongs to an uncle, an assistant, a farm or a personal name different from the documents, stop. A payment into a third party's account is money you have handed to a stranger.

The order matters

Title search, then coordinates, then chain, then consent, then zoning, then encumbrances, then identity. Do them in that order and a bad deal fails early, before your emotions are involved and before your money has left.

All seven together take about two to three weeks when the documents are clean. Two to three weeks is a small price for a lifetime of ownership.

What happened to Amina

We did not recover everything. She sold one of the documents for what she could get and accepted the loss on the rest, which is the part of this work that keeps me awake.

But she bought again, through us, six months later. Properly. The search came back clean, the surveyor found the beacons, the chain had four links and every one of them was registered, and the consent was already in the file. A plot in an organised estate off the Kuje corridor, at a fair price for what it was.

She came back a year later and photographed the road that had been graded to her gate. She did not say anything clever. She just smiled and said she now sleeps with both eyes closed.

That is the whole job, really. Land you can stand on, keep and use, for years, without a stranger's signature deciding your future.

If you are about to pay for land, bring the documents before you pay, not after. We will check them with you, at no cost, and tell you plainly what is real and what is not.

Book a free property investment consultation with Tessy Luxury Properties. We will sit with your brief, check your budget against current Abuja prices, and tell you honestly which districts make sense for what you want to achieve. You can also reach us on WhatsApp on +234 818 088 9398.