Factors Influencing Tenants’ Choice of Location of Residence in Bosso Local Municipality, Minna, Nigeria

Abstract

Residential location choice (RLC) is key to the pattern of urban development in any city. This paper investigates factors influencing the choice of residential location by tenants in Bosso Local Government Area (LGA), Minna. The objective of the paper is to establish the roles played by a variety of housing attributes, and thus the design is an analytical survey. Data was collected from 277 structured questionnaires completed by household heads who are tenants in Bosso LGA neighbourhoods. This data was further investigated through factor analysis to reduce the variety of housing variables to a smaller set of influential components. The results reveal that the principal component in the determination of residential location of tenants is dwelling attributes comprising of the number of bathrooms, number of toilets and number of bedrooms. In addition, the second principal component, named accessibility attributes, plays a modest role with proximity to a secondary school and/or primary school loading very high. The study recommends that property owners should respond to the desires of tenants by paying attention to the provision of the right ratio of bathrooms and toilets to the number of bedrooms. Also, urban planners and policymakers should efficiently allocate educational properties like secondary and primary schools across all the neighbourhoods in the study area. With these recommendations, it is hoped that residential locations across Bosso LGA will be equally attractive to tenants.