The number of South African investors aiming to tap into the potentially lucrative African property market is on the rise, according to the Knight Frank Africa Report 2015.
Driving this trend is a demographic statistic set to be one of the most important world shapers over the course of the century.
According to Knight Frank’s Africa Report 2015, released last week, Africa’s population will quadruple to over four-billion by 2100, with nearly one-billion of these people in Nigeria alone.
Tony Galetti and Francois Staples, joint-CEO and cofounder of Galetti Knight Frank, said South African investors have been turning their attention to other African markets as they search for better returns than those available domestically and aim to diversify their holdings.
“Large cities in the fastest-growing economies have been the main targets for investment, particularly Nigeria (Lagos), Ghana (Accra), Kenya (Nairobi) and Angola (Luanda), as well as Mozambique (Maputo), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam) and Zambia (Lusaka).
The South African property market has become highly competitive. As a result, property funds and institutional property owners are targeting the rest of the African continent for growth opportunities.
“The Egyptian economy is attracting increased investment from the Gulf countries and large infrastructure projects such as the Suez Canal expansion should also help growth,” Galetti and Staples said.
Egypt is set to unseat South Africa as the continent’s second-largest economy in 2019 according to International Monetary Fund projections, commanding a GDP of $528.7-billion, with South Africa trailing at $426.8-billion.
