106 Properties and Other Stories

What the late great Herbert Wigwe’s London footprint reveals about Nigerian capital, the buy-to-let trade — and the quiet office that is already taking notes

When the story broke that the late great Herbert Wigwe had been linked to 106 properties in London — ranked seventh on a global list of offshore property holders in the British capital by The Londoner‘s investigation — Nigeria did what Nigeria does best. It lost its collective mind.

But the London headline obscured a quieter, more instructive story. In the towns of the North of England — places with single-platform train stations, towns like Crewe, Runcorn, and Hartlepool — Nigerians have become one of the largest groups of buy-to-let landlords. According to research by specialist lender Together, non-UK nationals now account for one in five newly established buy-to-let companies in the United Kingdom, up from thirteen per cent in 2016. In the most recent period measured, Nigerians were the second most prominent foreign nationality registering new buy-to-let companies — 647 new corporations, behind only Indians. This was not a handful of outliers. It was a pattern, pursued intelligently and at scale by a diaspora that understood, earlier than most, that the north of England offered something London had long since stopped providing: yield that was actually worth earning.

Now let me come back to Herbert. Twitter, or whatever we are calling it this week, ran hot within the hour of the story breaking. WhatsApp groups dropped school fees complaints and church announcements to trade screenshots of The Londoner‘s report. The reactions sorted themselves into their familiar tribes. There was the tribe of outrage: where did the money come from, capital flight, what about the people suffering at home. There was the tribe of admiration — that particularly Nigerian register of competitive aspiration, not quite envy, not quite pride, something in between. And then there was the largest and most honest tribe, the one nobody admits to belonging to: the people already sending voice notes to their contacts asking, very quietly, how does one actually do this?

I want to answer that question properly. And I want to accompany it with a warning that most of those voice notes will not contain.

The Trade That Made Sense

To understand why Nigerian capital flowed into northern English property, you need to understand the yield arithmetic that made it compelling.

In the North of England — Manchester, Liverpool, Salford — gross rental yields have consistently run between five and eight per cent on terraced stock acquired for £70,000 to £120,000. In parts of Yorkshire and the North East, yields nudge higher still. Compare that to a naira deposit account that spent the last decade losing the race against inflation, or Lagos real estate where yields rarely clear five per cent once the full cost of ownership is counted, and the logic writes itself. Property denominated in sterling, in a currency that held its value as the naira fell from roughly ₦480 to the pound in 2020 to nearly ₦1,900 by 2025, was not just an investment. It was a currency hedge.

The infrastructure supporting this trade has been quietly professional for years. Property investment events targeting Nigerian buyers were running in Lagos as far back as 2017, with UK developers making the journey specifically to court a market they recognised as serious and capital-ready.

The Tax Picture That Many Buyers Missed

Here is where the sober section of the conversation begins. Because the tax environment for foreign landlords in the United Kingdom is, if you have not looked at it recently, considerably less generous than it once appeared.

Start with acquisition. A non-UK resident purchasing an additional residential property in England pays Stamp Duty Land Tax at the standard rates, plus a three per cent surcharge for additional properties, plus a further two per cent surcharge for overseas buyers. On a £100,000 property — a typical northern English terraced house — that combination adds a meaningful sum before a tenant has been found or a pound of rent collected.

Then comes the income. Under the Non-Resident Landlord Scheme, letting agents are required to deduct basic rate income tax from rental payments before remitting them to overseas landlords, unless the landlord has applied to HMRC for approval to receive income gross and file a self-assessment return. The rental income is taxable in Britain regardless of where the owner lives. Many investors, particularly those who acquired through intermediaries at arm’s length, may not have engaged fully with this requirement.

The more significant structural shift, however, is Section 24. From 2020 onwards, the UK removed the ability of individual landlords to deduct mortgage interest from rental income before calculating tax, replacing it with a basic rate tax credit only. For a higher-rate taxpayer — which a Nigerian investor with professional income is likely to be — this is transformative. A leveraged portfolio that appeared profitable on the pre-2020 rules can, on the new rules, generate a paper profit and a cash loss simultaneously. The rental income is taxed before the mortgage is paid.

And when the time comes to sell — Capital Gains Tax applies. Non-UK residents must report any property disposal to HMRC within sixty days of completion and pay any tax due at that point. Rates on residential property have risen since the original trade was made. For a large portfolio with capital gains accumulated over years of price appreciation, the CGT exposure on disposal is a number that requires professional advice to calculate and careful planning to manage.

The Renters’ Rights Bill: The Insurance Policy Is Gone

Beyond tax, the regulatory environment has shifted as fundamentally as the fiscal one.

The Renters’ Rights Bill, now law, abolishes Section 21 — the no-fault eviction mechanism that allowed landlords to reclaim properties with two months’ notice and no stated reason. For investors managing portfolios from a distance, this was the quiet insurance policy that made the enterprise feel manageable. It has been replaced by a court-based process requiring specific legal grounds — slower, costlier, and less predictable.

Energy Performance Certificate requirements add further pressure on older stock. The government’s trajectory toward minimum EPC ratings means a terraced house bought in 2015 may now require insulation, a new boiler, or window replacement before it can legally be let. Several boroughs have added mandatory landlord registration schemes, with eye-watering fines for non-compliance. None of these costs appear on the original spreadsheet.

I grew up professionally in that market, and I know that when it gets difficult, non-residents rarely get a fair hearing. Going in with a clear understanding of what happens if things go wrong is not optional — it is the entry requirement. Yemi Edun of Daniel Ford, one of the established cross-border property advisory practices working this space, puts it squarely: “The strength of cross-border property investment advisory lies in understanding the nuances of multiple jurisdictions, from Lagos to London, where regulation, taxation and opportunity intersect, and in keeping pace with constant change. Clients should look to build not just portfolios, but legacies that extend into the second and even third generation.” That is the right frame. Not a trade. A structure, built to last.

The Quiet Office

I spent years as an auditor in the United Kingdom before relocating to Nigeria, and I know what happens when a story of this scale breaks.

Somewhere in HMRC, a team is being assembled — its project name something deliberately unmemorable, a Neptune or a Silverfish, the kind of name designed to reveal nothing to anyone who stumbles across the calendar invite. The transparency reforms that made The Londoner‘s investigation possible were not designed to facilitate press coverage. They were designed to facilitate tax compliance. The same data published by the newspaper is available, in considerably greater detail, to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. They know who owns what. They know what was declared. They know the gap between the two — and now they have a trend. HMRC likes trends.

The work will be systematic, not personal. It will cross-reference overseas-owned properties against non-resident landlord scheme registrations and identify discrepancies. It will examine whether rental income was declared, whether CGT was paid on disposals, and whether the offshore structures used — the Jersey companies, the BVI vehicles, the layered corporate arrangements — were disclosed as the law now requires.

Nigeria’s investing class is not the primary audience for this exercise. But it is  now visible in the data. And visibility, in a compliance context, is rarely comfortable.

The Portfolio as a Mirror

I want to end where I began: with Herbert Wigwe. He was, a builder and a philanthropist. The grief, when that helicopter went down was genuine — it was about the loss of a particular kind of ambition, the ambition to build something serious, to make something that lasted.

The London properties are part of that story. They represent a rational response to a real yield gap, executed at scale by someone who understood capital allocation better than most. What they also represent, now that the law has illuminated them, is an unfinished conversation about tax, transparency, and the obligations that accompany holding assets in another country’s jurisdiction.

The voice notes asking how to replicate what he did deserve a straight answer. The answer is: carefully, with full tax compliance from day one, with eyes open to a regulatory environment that has changed materially since the trade was first conceived.

The yield gap is still real. The game has simply changed around it.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com. She writes from Lagos.