What Does It Actually Take to Secure Larger Off-Plan Assets?

In this guide

Off-Plan Investment Guide

01

The 90sqm Unit

02

The 120sqm Unit

03

The 150sqm Unit

Shell and core explained

04

On service charges (CAM)

05

06

Legal matters

07

Trade-offs

One final question

08

90

The 90sqm Unit

The lifestyle retail threshold

A 90sqm unit attracts stable mid-size corporate retailers and pharmacy chains. These businesses have strong financial structure, staff, and lease consistency. This size prevents prolonged vacancies without being too large to easily manage. For investors, it balances steady rental income and tenant reliability in Lagos

Signage & frontage rights — your Contract of Sale should explicitly protect these. In a larger mall, visibility is your primary commercial asset. Signage and frontage rights are clauses your lawyer builds into your Contract of Sale that prevents the developer from placing common-area obstructions — temporary kiosks, pop-up displays — directly in front of your unit.

At this size, the infrastructure beneath the lease matters more than it did at smaller units. The humid Lagos climate means HVAC systems must be scaled to handle higher interior heat loads and denser foot traffic — a 90sqm unit requires dedicated zonal environmental control, an independent system to manage temperature, humidity, and airflow. High-traffic malls in Lagos (like those in Lekki or Sangotedo) often provide central HVAC infrastructure. Still, you are typically responsible for connecting your unit to the main system and installing your own interior vents. This is the norm, but what you get most vitally depends on your developer. Therefore, clarifying exactly what you will be receiveing is important before you buy.

Infrastructure

Leasing

Your 90sqm tenant will typically want a three to five year term. You can use that to your advantage by building in a stepped rent clause — annual increases of around 5–10% are standard in the Nigerian market, and they protect you against the long-term erosion of a fixed rental rate against inflation.

120

The 120sqm Unit

Health, wellness & QSR segment

At 120sqm, you're in the range that regional bank branches and large grocery operators consider. These tenants move in after painstaking research. They conduct their own site assessments, involve their facilities teams, and often require specific utility configurations before they move in. The process of securing them takes longer, but once they're in, they stay — for a long time.

Infrastructure

The Triple Net Lease (NNN)

At 120sqm, the lease structure you should be pursuing is a Triple Net arrangement — NNN. Under this structure, the tenant bears the cost of utilities, building insurance, and routine maintenance rather than those costs falling on you. For a high-traffic operation like a bank or a QSR, this is of importance because their utility footprint is significant, and without an NNN structure, those rising costs will steadily compress your net operating income over the life of the lease.

Before you look at anything else — before the floor plan, before the projected yield, before the lease terms — you need to verify the four structural and utility elements the developer must deliver to your unit. Kindly note that these are not finishing details. They are the conditions under which any true tenant will agree to sign, and they are the elements that cannot be corrected after you have taken ownership.

What you will be verifying has nothing to do with paint, tiling, or fit-out aesthetics. Those are the tenant's responsibility entirely, and any attempt to pre-engineer the space for a specific industry before a tenant is signed will cost you money you will not recover. What you are verifying is the structural backbone: dedicated electrical capacity, a correctly positioned AC ledge, pre-installed drainage knockouts, and adequate slab-to-slab height. Each one is either present in the developer's drawings or it is not — and if it is not, no amount of negotiation after the fact will put it there at no cost to you.

For a full breakdown of each requirement — what it is, why it matters, and the specific questions to put to the developer's MEP engineer before your deposit changes hands — read the dedicated guide: What the Developer Must Deliver to Your 120sqm Unit →

150

The 150sqm Unit

The anchor tenant anchor-point

At 150sqm, you are dealing with large-format anchor tenants — tenants whose presence in a mall gives other tenants a reason to sign, and shoppers a reason to visit. Large restaurant chains, major electronics retailers, lifestyle brands. At this level, what you offer must be more than a shop.

Infrastructure

A major retailer will not accept a unit where stock replenishment happens through the customer entrance. Rear-service access — a loading dock or a service corridor connecting directly to the back of the unit — is a baseline requirement. You know if the unit you're buying will have it by checking if the architectural plans show such.

You should also request the structural design certificates. High-density retailers — supermarkets, appliance stores — place significant weight on a floor slab through racking systems, stock, and foot traffic. The slab must be engineered to handle that live load.

If you feel this summary is insufficient, explore the full breakdown on infrastructural needs here →

The Co-tenancy Clause

At this scale, one lease clause that deserves particular attention is your Co-tenancy Clause. It is important to understand the direction of this right from the outset: the co-tenancy clause is not a protection you hold as the owner. It is a right you grant to your tenant. A sophisticated corporate tenant — a bank, a national pharmacy chain, a major QSR — will demand it as a condition of signing, because their business performance depends on the mall's overall health. If the mall's anchor tenants depart and foot traffic collapses, this co-tenancy clause gives your tenant the right to pay reduced rent, or in extreme cases, to exit the lease early.

Agreeing to the clause in principle is often necessary to attract credit-worthy tenants at this unit size. The question is not whether to include it, but how to define it tightly enough that it cannot be triggered carelessly — and what protections you negotiate in return. A Cure Period, a precisely named trigger anchor, and a formal notice requirement before any remedy is exercised are the minimum safeguards your lawyer should be building in.

For a full breakdown of how the clause works, what can trigger it, and exactly how to protect yourself as the owner, read the dedicated guide on the co-tenancy clause →

The Facility Management firm

Being an important stakeholder in the mall, it is advised to vet the quality of the Facility Management firm the developer intends to appoint. A poorly managed facility — unreliable power, deteriorating common areas — is not compatible with a 150sqm anchor tenant. Accordingly, it follows that you require a performance audit of the FM firm.

On shell and core

At 90sqm and above, developers will often hand over what is called a shell and core unit. That means you receive the bare structure — the columns, the raw floor, the ceiling slab, and the building's core utilities. The finishing work — tiling, lighting, plumbing, air conditioning, internal partitions, shopfront glazing — is a separate cost that falls on your tenant, and it is not a negligible one.

On service charges

Every owner in a mall contributes to shared operational costs — power, security, cleaning, maintenance of common areas. This is called the Common Area Maintenance charge, or CAM.

Larger units consume more power and place a heavier load on shared infrastructure. Your facility management agreement must be clearly worded on how service charges are calculated — to, nonetheless, avoid the risk of being charged disproportionately, absorbing costs that should be spread more equitably across unit sizes.

Your legal counsel should ensure the agreement contains a transparent formula for how CAM contributions are calculated, and you may push for a clause that obligates the developer or facility manager to provide regular financial reporting on how those funds are spent. At the scale of a 90sqm–150sqm investment, this is has greater direct impact on your return.

Two points your lawyer should be prioritising for your units.

Legal matters

Right of First Refusal

A Right of First Refusal clause gives you the right to purchase adjacent units, or to match any offer made on those units, before anyone else is given that opportunity. It is a future leverage that becomes increasingly valuable as your investment grows in capital value.

Clean, verifiable title documentation

Institutional tenants — banks in particular — do not commit to a lease on a unit unless its title can be cleanly verified at the Land Registry. Accordingly, before you finalise your purchase, confirm the developer can provide a Deed of Assignment registered specifically to your unit — not a promise that it will be done, but evidence that it can be done, and a contractual commitment to deliver it.

If you would like to know what qualifies as that evidence, see here →

Trade-offs

Larger units typically show a lower yield per sqm than smaller, high-turnover retail spaces. This is because they usually demand a volume discount to close the deal. To balance this, they offer longer leases, corporate-backed tenants, and lower management demands. You give up some flexibility, and gain more stability.

The more important question to sit with before investing at this scale is whether the specific location has the demographic and commercial depth to support a 150sqm retailer. Areas with strong residential density make for viable commercial corridors, and that viability has to be interrogated honestly.

An expensive vacancy in a large, well-finished unit in a mall that cannot generate consistent foot traffic is a harder problem to solve than a vacant kiosk. This is because it isn't as easily sold off.

To know how viability is interrogated, see here →

Ask the developer for projected rental yields per square metre. Then independently verify what comparable large-format units in completed nearby malls are actually achieving in rent.

Think about your exit before you enter. It is a more intricate process to sell off a large commercial unit than it is to dispose of a 30sqm one. Your buyer becomes someone specifically looking for a long-term commercial hold. That may be a reason for some to avoid the investment, but to others, it is a reason to go in with a clear view of how you would exit if you needed to, and on what timeline.

More sophisticated exit strategies for larger units →

The same three actions from the smaller units guide apply here. At this scale, you add a few more.

Before you ink the deal — five actions

01

02

03

Have a property lawyer review all your documents — with specific attention to the CAM formula, Right of First Refusal, and Deed of Assignment deliverables.

04

05

Request the floor plan and confirm rear-service access is present for any unit above 90sqm.

Ask for verified yield projections per sqm, then independently verify against comparable completed malls nearby.

Request the Fit-out Manual → on day one, and make sure it is attached to your contract as a reference document.

Ask the developer how many KVA is allocated to each specific unit, and how is it metered. See the section below.

In Lagos, the cost of generating electricity is a primary margin-killer in commercial real estate. If a developer does not have a robust, individualized smart-metering system for your unit, they will resort to charging a flat-rate service charge or an arbitrary per-square-metre power fee. This means a low-power tenant (like a clothing boutique) ends up subsidizing the massive power bills of a high-power tenant (like a fast-food café).

This question — how is power allocated and measured at the unit level — is the starting point of a broader energy assessment; a broader energy assessment to be carried out by your Mechanical & Electrical (M&E) Engineer before your purchase.

"How many KVA is allocated to this specific unit, and how is it metered?"

But, what if you're considering an off-plan project? How do you position yourself to benefit from the profits of off-plan investments without purchasing power infrastructure blindly? More guidance here→

One final question — ask it on every unit