Kenya Real Estate Sector: Occupier Services by Ben Woodhams of Knight Frank Kenya

Ben Woodhams, Managing Director at Knight Frank Kenya, talks about one of the company’s main focuses: occupier services.

“We are a real estate consultancy so we have to cover all of the different aspects of that. One of the things that we have been focusing on very closely recently is what we call “occupier services”, that is to say servicing the occupiers, the tenants themselves, looking after the global corporates, the FDI who are coming into this market. Historically, we have represented most of the owners of Grade A office space. We sit back and say that we are looking after the landlords so someone else can look after the tenants. But what we have been neglecting historically is that looking after those tenants is also a very important role and there is nothing to stop us from doing both. Although Knight Frank does not have the most global mandates in the world, we do have a good number of them, clients that Knight Frank represents globally, occupier clients. But also, because we are very well established in this market and we have these international contacts, we can actually compete with other organizations that have global mandates who are not very well represented here in Nairobi or in Kenya as a whole. We are starting to specialize in looking after tenants, looking after those big global players. Although they occupy only a small part of an office building, they are often much bigger clients to Knight Frank globally than the owners of those buildings themselves. That is an aspect we have been focusing on over the last five years”, says Ben Woodhams.

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