Real Estate Sector in Kenya: “Nairobi is a Regional Hub” says Ben Woodhams

Ben Woodhams, Managing Director at Knight Frank, gives his assessment of the real estate sector in Kenya at the moment, explaining why Nairobi is a good place to be.

“If you look at Kenya in a regional context, Nairobi is a regional hub. Therefore, you could say that the property market comprises two tiers: the national market and the regional market. We have clients in Nairobi who run not just their East African businesses from here, but also their Central African businesses. From that point of view, the African continent is run from an axis encompassing Lagos, Nairobi and Johannesburg – which makes Nairobi a good place to be. It’s a large and important regional hub, and has been so for at least the last 15 years. If you go further back than that, you will find that big global corporations have traditionally run Sub-Saharan Africa from Johannesburg, but in the last 15 years, we have seen many of those companies wake up to the fact that there is a population of 150 million people in East Africa, they need regional headquarters here, and I believe this has really been where we have seen most of the growth in the last 15 years”, says Ben Woodhams.