Dennis Isong: The Six Types of Certificate of Occupancy You Should Know About

Certificate of occupancy is a legally issued document that certifies an individual as the rightful owner of a building or property. The document will be prepared and issued when it’s in compliance with the necessary legal instructions. With the spread of forgery and fake digital designs, people need to be careful when signing this document so as to avoid getting duped. So it is important to get your certificate of occupancy legally.

There are different categories of certificate of occupancy. Each category depends on the type an individual or organisation or process needs to adopt, that is, a C of O document prepared for an individual is different from the document prepared for an organisation. However, people are only aware of the residential certificate of occupancy that lasts for 99 years.

The residential certificate of occupancy, also known as individual certificate of occupancy, is obtained when you buy a land to build a residence. This certificate can be used to obtain a loan, can last for 99 years and you can prepare it with your own name.

Another is C of O is the agricultural certificate of occupancy. This type is for people who are into farming and intend to use their land for farming or for business. For instance, in Ikorodu, most lands in Epe are zoned under Agric zone. If you want to reprocess that land in the future, it can be changed to residential. The tenure for Agric C of O is 25 to 28 years.

Then we have the industrial certificate of occupancy, which is given to industries like Dangote, companies (not an individual), and lasts up to 35 years. To get this kind of certificate, your land will be at the extreme end of the city where there is less population of people.

We also have the family certificate of occupancy. If you are familiar with Lagos terrain, you would notice that there are some families that have certificates of occupancy in their name. This doesn’t have a tenure. Before a family can have that certificate of occupancy, it means the government gave them based on their reputation.

Another type of C of O is government allocation, and is issued by the government directly. It is an allocation that can be given to a company, ministry, a reputable person, or foreign investors. If a foreigner comes to invest in the country, the government can allocate land to the company the individual represents or the individual instead of buying a land.

The last certificate of occupancy is excision. It is a piece of land that the government releases to native peoples or settlers after completing the correct, legal procedures. When a land has excision, there can’t be another kind of certificates of occupancy on that land. The next type of title you can process for that land is the government’s consent but before you can do this, the land has to have a gazette.

A gazette is the legal newspaper of a country or a state that publishes the text of new laws, treaties, regulations, court decisions, legal notices and decrees. When an excision land is published, it is what we call gazetted land. It is after that that you can then upgrade it to a government’s consent. Emphatically, excision is given only to a village.

Nowadays, people need to go through proper procedures while preparing their land documents to avoid deceptions, wrong selection and future troubles. Land argument is a delicate matter that can cause a huge problem as much as inter-ethnic crisis.

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