Perusing Factors in Locating Specialized Buildings in Rural Areas, SW Nigeria

The rural areas of Southwest of Nigeria have continued to witness an unprecedented growth in specialized property development. The said developments are so called because of their opulence, design and sizes of land obtained for the development. Interest of researchers have continued to grow in understanding reasons behind locating such developments in the rural areas where modern infrastructure and facilities are in short supply. This research scrutinizes the factors that motivate such developers into choosing present locations. The research design adopted was that of a cross-sectional survey which incorporates the use of questionnaire for data collection. The target population consisting of the Specialized Property Owners and the Practicing Estate Surveyors and Valuers (Realtors) in the sampled States. The results obtained from the two sampled populations were compared. The objective is to determine the agreement through ranking of the opinions of the specialized property owners on one hand and that of the practicing Estate Surveyors and Valuers who are experts in land matters on the other hand. Politically, Southwest zone is made up of six States, three out of these were chosen for this study for convenience due to the spread of the zone. The chosen States are Ondo, Osun and Ekiti States. The result obtained revealed that owners of specialized developments in the region ranked luxury of space as the most important factor followed by status and social class, culture/tradition and family influence as forth. The least ranked are education which was ranked tenth, independence ranked eleventh, continuity twelfth and cheaper cost of living as thirteenth. In the opinion of the Estate Surveyors and Valuers, status and social class was ranked first, family influence as second, continuity third and independence as forth. The least ranked by the practitioners are politics/political power which was ranked tenth, retirement plan eleventh, serene environment twelfth and cheaper cost of living as thirteenth. Two hypothesis were tested and the Kruskal Wallis test conducted to measure the agreement in opinions of these two respondents revealed that there were statistically significant differences in the opinion of the two sets of respondents at 0.05 significant level