22 Aug 2022

Mushrooming properties is an indication of growth in property business sector.

Thee new development has two sides, that consumers are spoilt for choice, but that has posed to be a test to the industry players who are struggling to keep occupancy of old buildings, and such was the case for Khumo Property Asset Management Company.

With the company managing more than 500 leases in a portfolio of buildings worth about P3 billion, the company is currently on a path seeking to retain market share of the booming property business in the country.

While the company is considered to be leading the pack in the property space, recent developments in the market have led the company to reevaluate their positioning and their competitiveness to make their clients happy.

Speaking on the sidelines during the company’s recent media engagement session, the CEO Mr Outule Bale, acknowledged that competition in this space was a constant challenge.

“Being at the front of the curve is not an easy thing to maintain because everybody wants to take away from you. It is hard to keep the clients that you have,” he said.

However in trying to deal with this challenge he said they strived to listen and to keep up with the desires of the clients to avoid the risk of losing them to their competitors.

 Besides that he said next month the company would review it’s strategy bearing in mind that today’ client was sophisticated in their understanding of what the company was trying to do for them. Also, he said they would look into how best they could implore technology to do things better.

Nonetheless, he explained that the company was currently working to revamp and modernise some properties in their cluster of portfolios to keep up with modern trends and retain their key clientele.

One of the exciting projects the company was currently working on he cited a four star hotel in Jwaneng and a private hospital in Palapye for some of their clients.

Further, he said the company recently acquired a hotel in Maun for one of their clients.

He pointed out that ordinary Batswana always enquired about their services.

 Although they possess land in large quantities the challenge was that there was no innovation nor creativity on the land use.

“Batswana have land but sometimes the land would not be in a suitable area or the plot would be very small to do something of an impact,” he said adding that in such instances they advised accordingly. 

Meanwhile Property Manager Commercial Mr Barulaganye Paakane explained that in his portfolio the company was revamping and refurbishing office space at Fairgrounds housing the ministry of minerals and energy to retain the tenants.

He also said the company was facing a stiff competition in the office space with new centres opening up in the Central Business District (CBD).

As a result he said this year the company would spend P5 million to refurbish the fairgrounds office space and about P8.6 million on other projects including the refurbishment of Debswana house since it was a strategic building to mention but a few.

In the industrial side he said the company was performing well with a low vacancy rate while in the residential space portfolios they were doing extremely well too as the demand was high for the properties they managed on behalf of their clients such as BIFM.

Khumo Property Asset Management Company is a property development and management company which provides a wide range of commercial property skills in the Botswana and SADC markets. ENDS