Adebayo "Malik" Adekola.

"Every home I build, I build like my mother is moving in. That standard never changes."

The story

I have wanted to build homes since I was a child. Not flats, not investment units, real homes for real Nigerian families to live in and pass down. Every Nigerian I know carries some version of the same dream: a house that belongs to the family, that the children come home to, that does not move when life changes. The path to that house is broken for too many people, and the developers who should be making it easier have made it harder.

LivMalik exists to make that path simple again. Verifiable land. Honest pricing. Real photographs of real progress. Money held in escrow until the work is actually done. None of this is revolutionary. It is just what a developer should do, and almost no one does.

Before LivMalik

LivMalik is the real estate arm of my entrepreneurial work. Before this, I founded and ran KclautX, TheKclaut, and Repmirror. Each of those businesses taught me something different about delivery, customer trust, and the discipline of finishing what you start. LivMalik is the venture I have wanted to start the longest, and the one I waited longest to start, because building it properly mattered more than building it quickly.

I hold a Master of Business Administration from the University of Wolverhampton. I am based in the United Kingdom, which makes me half of the audience LivMalik serves: a Nigerian in the diaspora trying to build something at home, the right way, from a distance.

Why Ibadan

Because I know it. I grew up here. Twenty-two years of my life. The streets, the people, the way the city actually works rather than how it is described from outside. There are plenty of developers running residential projects in Lagos and Abuja. There are not enough doing it properly in Ibadan, the oldest Yoruba city in Nigeria and the place a large share of the diaspora actually has roots.

Block IV, Plots 2 and 3 in the Layout of Educational Zone at Ring Road GRA is not a speculative bet on a frontier. It is residential land with a clean title chain, in a neighbourhood where families already live in finished homes. I chose it because it is real, not because it is cheap.

Why three houses, not thirty

Because this is the first project, and the first project sets every project after it. Three houses, identical specification, side by side, on one site. One crew. One materials brief. One opening of the gate when they are finished.

I would rather build three houses properly than three hundred in announcements. Project II will start when the buyers of Project I are sitting in their kitchens, not before. Most developer collapses in Nigeria happen because someone tried to scale before they could deliver. I am not going to do that.

Àríkẹ́, the first house

House 001 is named Àríkẹ́, after my mother. In Yoruba, the name means one to be cherished. She is alive and well, and she is one of the reasons I am able to do this work at this stage of my life. The care she gave growing up is the care I want built into these homes.

I will be on the site every week of the build, on camera every week, until the keys are handed over. If a buyer's lawyer wants to see a document, they get it. If a buyer wants to see a wall on a Tuesday, we send a photo on Tuesday. That is the level of accountability I want LivMalik to operate at, project after project. It starts with this one.