In the UK and US, the term ‘property ladder’ refers to the process of buying a relatively cheap property and selling it later at a profit in order to upgrade: a series of incremental steps towards acquiring your ‘dream’ home. This does not reflect the reality of peoples’ experience of property in most of the world, where the incremental process that matters most is about taking steps to achieve security over the land on which you want to develop your property. The pervasive lack of tenure security in Lagos - a city characterised by booming real estate and the ruthless pursuit of profit from land – is widely acknowledged; but mainstream approaches to this issue tend to depict property rights as something that you either have or you don’t. In this paper, we argue that in Lagos the reality is very different: claims to property are made more (or less) real over time through a series of incremental processes, which comprise another form of ‘property ladder’. We explore how realising property rights requires actively working on multiple fronts - economic, legal, social and political – in order to deepen, entrench, and solidify these rights. This effectively amounts to a system of rights by instalment, in which taxation and multiple other forms of formal and informal payments play a key role. Property rights here are thus not a ‘digital’ system of zeros and ones, haves and have-nots, but ‘analogue’: a system of degree and gradation, rooted in history but open to innovative action.