Ubunifu — 16 October 2026
People often ask me what I actually do. The latest job title is property developer, although I have never been entirely comfortable with it. The words tend to call up a familiar figure: rich, brash, intent on wringing return and value from every square centimetre of a site, usually a greenfield plot or a city block, for the largest gain it will give.
It is also a figure I have never recognised in the work we do, which is a good deal more nuanced. We treat space deliberately left unbuilt as part of the value, rely far more heavily on understanding what the seasons do to a site, and use shade and light as much as any tangible building material.
In the expensive cities of the developed world, the biggest value-adds are space, light and greenery: the south-facing aspect, the kitchen extension, the garden, the proximity to a park or common.
Here in Tanzania and Zanzibar, and across much of Africa, we have all of these in abundance and the best developers and designers in the segments we work in also understand that a space should pay homage to what surrounds it rather than to what lies within.
A developer in a first-world market also starts from a set of givens we rarely have. The plot comes zoned, its boundaries surveyed and registered; there is a road to it and mains to connect to; and the architects, engineers, contractors and suppliers needed to deliver a modern building with professional finishes are a phone call away.
We work without most of that, on sites where there is no zoning to say what the land may become, where local boundaries follow generations of word-of-mouth ownership that went unregulated and may wander accordingly. Nor is there a fixed system of land values around which to cost and plan, and sites are difficult to quantify.
Hidden costs skew the process further: there may be mango trees and coconut palms on a site in Zanzibar, each with an owner who has to be compensated. All of this is difficult to align with the way a first-world developer works, with values modelled, regulated and in hand from the outset, and it has to be calmly explained to clients who do not believe it to be real. We see those same trees as assets ourselves, with a value of their own, giving a site the presence around which to build.
We cannot expect, once work begins, the regular supply of electricity and water, the trained people or the proven, steady supply chains that a developer elsewhere would take for granted, and the planning around their absence calls on an experience no spreadsheet can replicate. We simply do not develop here in the same way.
Expertise can be brought in, if the international standards of construction and finish our clients expect require it, but the cost demands a scale few projects can support, and even then, technical ability is of limited use without people alongside it who know how to work here.
The same need for adjustment is also bestowed on clients, who arrive with ideas plucked from magazines and brochures, often convinced that the place can be made to fit the project, and have to be brought, patiently, to an understanding of what the place will allow.
These conditions make the work harder, but they are also what has allowed African hospitality and real estate to differentiate themselves over the decades. This is where experience teaches us to build with shade and light, to use landscaping to frame the view, and to draw on local artisans and their techniques where the local supply chain falls short.
Done well, a property in the bush or on the coast can command the same rates as a top urban hotel, without the elaborate interiors or technological knick-knacks, because its value lies in how it brings what surrounds it into the experience itself.
Taken together, these conditions would raise so many red flags that, under regular circumstances, no development would ever start. For us, they are the starting point of every project, and working through them bears little resemblance to what property developers are generally thought to do.
Which brings me back to the question I am so often asked: if we are not real property developers, what is it that we do?
Perhaps the closest comparison is with a film producer. A film producer writes none of the script, directs no scene and appears in none of the film, yet holds the whole of it at once — the money, the team, the story and the audience — and without that person the film does not get made.
On the projects we take on, each of those has to be found or made. The story grows from the place itself: what surrounds the site, what should be kept and what can be made of it. Around it, we assemble the money and the team, bringing specialist expertise together with people who understand the environment and know how to deliver here. Throughout, we have to understand the audience: who will be drawn to the place, what they will come for and whether the story we are telling speaks to them.
In practice, the story has to survive the process of making it. Feasibility, concept and masterplan come first, giving it form and testing what the land can support and how the experience we envisage will work, before the financial model asks whether the project can earn enough to justify the cost of making it.
The approvals then turn it into a proposition the authorities can assess and permit, while the unit mix and pricing bring the audience’s expectations into balance with the economics.
Brand and sales give the story a public voice, informed by what else is being offered and who we are trying to reach, and through construction we work alongside the architect, who in this telling is closest to the director, making sure every element contributes to the coherent whole on which the project was pitched.
The visible work belongs to the architect, the engineers, the contractors and the artisans; the commercial and creative logic that ties it together has to sit with one party, accountable for it from the first conversation with a landowner about who owns the mango trees through to opening night.
Most of the best properties in African hospitality have been made this way, by people who read a site as a story and produced it, and each would deserve its Oscar — the one that goes, fittingly, to the producers — for being unlike anything produced elsewhere in the world. It is a very particular skill-set, learned through experience, from being on set and working the story through.
Some of the blockbuster franchises have lost that ability along the way, the classic safari camp increasingly among them, where each was once a unique experience and most are now built to the same formula. The ability to work with what is available, to make the most of an environment and its resources, and to approach a site with creativity first and the spreadsheet in its service, is what made Africa the incubator of experiential travel long before the term was invented.
When people ask, I still say property developer. The explanation takes a little longer.