This guide covers the four things you must verify in the developer's drawings before your deposit changes hands, and why each one determines whether your future tenant will sign or walk.

120sqm Investor Guide · Lagos

What the Developer Must Deliver to Your 120sqm Unit

In this guide

01

02

03

05

04

06

The shell-and-core principle

The AC ledge

Slab-to-slab height

Electrical capacity & DB box

Drainage knockouts

What the tenant pays for

This guide is a companion to the broader piece on buying 90sqm and above in an off-plan Lagos mall. If you haven't read that yet, you may want to start there →

What shell and core actually means for you

When you purchase a 120sqm unit from a Lagos mall developer, you are buying what is called a shell-and-core space. The developer hands you the bare structure — the columns, the raw concrete floor, the ceiling slab above you, and the building's core utility connections. Everything else — the tiling, the partitions, the lighting, the air conditioning units, the shopfront — is the tenant's responsibility, paid for entirely out of their fit-out budget.

High-value corporate tenants operate to their own global design templates and brand colour systems. Any attempt on your part to pre-fit the space for a specific industry before a tenant is secured will cost you money upfront, only for that tenant to strip it all out during their fit-out period and start from scratch with their own contractors. Pre-fitting loses you money on both ends.

Your role is to ensure the structural backbone is unimpeachable, then leave the aesthetics entirely to the tenant. What that backbone must contain is where your due diligence needs to be focused.

There are four structural and utility elements you must verify before committing to a purchase. These are not items that can be negotiated, added after handover, or corrected through a fit-out. They are either built into the developer's drawings or they are not.

The four infrastructure requirements

Dedicated Electrical Capacity & DB Box

Requirement 01

Your unit must have its own dedicated electrical distribution board — a DB box — with a minimum provision of 30 to 50 KVA capacity, alongside a dedicated, independently metered water inlet.
What this means in practice: the developer has already run the main electricity and water lines directly to the edge of your unit. The DB box installed inside your space is completely independent of the rest of the mall's distribution system.

Minimum 30–50 KVA · Independent metering

To put the KVA figure in context: a standard residential property in Lagos runs on roughly 10 to 15 KVA. A commercial retail space needs two to three times that because tenants run large commercial air conditioning systems, hundreds of high-intensity display lights, and heavy electrical equipment simultaneously and continuously, across a full trading day.

The risk if this is absent

A weak power connection will cause the tenant's circuit breakers to trip repeatedly under normal operating load — plunging the store into darkness during trading hours. Without independent metering on the water inlet, you will face recurring disputes with mall management over water usage allocation. Neither problem is solvable after handover without significant cost.

A Dedicated AC Ledge

Requirement 02

Lagos is a climate that demands constant, powerful air conditioning in any commercial retail space. A commercial air conditioning system has two components: the indoor unit that distributes cooled air inside the store, and the outdoor compressor — a large, heavy machine — that expels heat outside the building. These two components must be connected by copper refrigerant pipes, and the length and routing of those pipes directly affects the system's cooling efficiency.

Structural · Positioned proximate to your unit

An AC ledge is a dedicated concrete shelf built onto the external wall of the mall to hold the outdoor compressor for your specific unit. You need to confirm that this ledge is assigned to your unit in the developer's structural drawings, that it is positioned close enough to your unit to allow direct pipe routing, and that it is rated for the load of commercial-grade compressors.

The risk if this is absent

Without a proximate AC ledge, a tenant is forced to route copper refrigerant pipes from their unit, through internal walls, up multiple floors to the main roof. This routing is expensive, it weakens the system's cooling capacity significantly, and most mall developers will refuse to permit it in any case. A tenant facing this situation will not sign your lease.

Capped Drainage Knockouts

Requirement 03

Drainage knockouts are pre-drilled openings in the concrete floor slab — plugged and capped — positioned close to the main structural columns of your unit. Think of them as the developer pre-installing connection points beneath the floor, ready to be opened and connected to plumbing when a tenant requires them. The plumbing lines are already built under the floor. The knockout simply exposes the access point.

Pre-installed · Positioned near structural columns

Their importance lies in the tenant types that make a 120sqm unit commercially viable — salons, cafés, pharmacies with dispensary sinks, QSRs. Each of these businesses needs water points, not just at the perimeter of the unit, but positioned within the space to suit their operational layout.

The risk if this is absent

If no pre-made drainage knockouts exist, a tenant requiring mid-floor water points must drill through the mall's structural concrete slab. This is a process that is loud, technically risky, and one that the majority of Lagos mall developers will flatly refuse to permit. A salon, café, or pharmacy that cannot position their water points where their operations require them will reject your space at the outset.

Adequate Slab-to-Slab Height

Requirement 04

The slab-to-slab height is the total distance from the bare concrete floor to the bare concrete ceiling directly above it, before any finishing work is applied. Your unit requires a minimum of 3.8 to 4.2 metres of this clear vertical space.

Minimum 3.8m to 4.2m clear

Corporate retail tenants do not leave the raw ceiling exposed. They will run large-diameter metal air conditioning ducts, fire sprinkler pipework, and electrical conduits from that ceiling slab, then conceal them entirely behind a smooth false ceiling installed beneath. The combined depth of that service zone — the ducts, pipes, and the false ceiling panel itself — typically consumes approximately one full metre of vertical space.

The risk if this is absent

If the developer has built to a lower slab height, the finished ceiling in your unit — after the tenant's service zone is installed — will sit uncomfortably low. The space will feel cramped to shoppers. Premium retail brands have their own minimum clear-height standards, and a unit that cannot meet them will be rejected during their site assessment, regardless of how attractive the location or the lease terms are.

The Lagos retail leasing market operates under a clear and long-established division of financial responsibility between the investor-landlord and the incoming tenant. Understanding this boundary precisely is what prevents you from spending capital where you have no obligation to.

What you provide and what the tenant provides

What you deliver

Walls & Structure: Bare, plastered blockwork

Flooring: Smooth, bare concrete screed

Ceiling & HVAC: Exposed concrete slab overhead

Utilities: Terminated DB box & metered water inlet

What the tenant pays for

Walls & Structure: Gypsum drywall partitions & brand paint

Flooring: Tiling, epoxy coat, or laminate

Ceiling & HVAC: False ceiling, lighting, & AC units

Utilities: Internal wiring, fixtures, & plumbing

If you found this guide useful, the broader context for buying at this size — leasing structures, Triple Net arrangements, the long-lease trade-offs, and the legal matters specific to 120sqm investments in Lagos — is covered in the full off-plan mall investment guide →

Contact: info@edetrealestate.com