Knight Frank Uganda: Turning COVID-19 Challenges into Opportunities

Judy Rugasira, Managing Director of Knight Frank Uganda, a leading independent real estate consultancy, explains how the company is turning COVID-19 challenges into opportunities, mentioning some areas that have potential of success and growth.

“Without a doubt, we foresee a lot of growth in a couple of sectors. The first one is consultancy. Consultancy and advisory services have really taken an upward swing during this time. Usually in times of uncertainty, that is when you really want the opinion of an expert. When things are okay and business is thriving, you can afford to take certain risks and certain gambles, but during unprecedented times like this, it is not really the time to be guessing and to be taking gambles and to be acting speculatively. We have found that our expert opinion is really being sought now across the board. We are seeing this from big corporate companies and organizations asking us how they can reoccupy because we have spent a lot of time with our global consultancy service line working on the office reoccupancy protocols. We have been very involved in advising clients as to how they should reoccupy, the behavioral changes that they should put in place in order to contend with, address, and mitigate transmission. And these are things that they really did not know and they needed advice from people like ourselves who are investing a lot of time into this issue. That is our core service at the end of the day. How do we mitigate transmission? What are we going to do about social distancing? What are we going to do in the environmental or mechanical side of things and buildings? Do we upgrade the filters in our AC to make them a higher spec so that they are able to block out as much of the virus as we possibly can? What happens with lifts? What happens with doors? What happens with the health and safety, PPE for security staff and our staff? What happens with cleaning protocols? How do we manage people coming into the buildings from door to desk? These are things that we have been heavily involved in with our clients, and even new clients, on the consultancy and advisory side of things, because they have genuinely wanted to seek the opinion of somebody who knows more about these things than they do. We are not experts in crisis management. We have never had to deal with a pandemic before. But because this is what we do every day, we were able to come up with protocols that we felt would mitigate the risk for our clients. Some property developers, for example, have just been on the brink of starting a development and they have come up to us and said, what do we do? Do we continue to restart? So, these are the areas where we felt we have given very useful input and where we have seen growth in that service line. We have seen a lot of inquiries into the healthcare sector as well, because, fortunately or unfortunately, that is a sector that has seen a lot of rapid growth during the crisis. We have seen a lot of health centers or healthcare operators expanding and we have been able to help them expand and roll out into various real estate products and finding these for them. Our case numbers in Uganda are going up, unfortunately. We are finding that the private sector and private health service providers are now having to start admitting and treating patients as well and this is something they were never used for. So, they have had to scale up very quickly. We have come in to advise on that because we have a database of what is available and we know at any one time what is available. We are able to suit the product that we have to the requirements that they have and, in some instances, even help them, adapt them, renovate them, refurbish them, and get them ready as quickly as possible”, says Judy Rugasira.

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