Real Estate Consultancy in Uganda: An Exclusive Interview with Judy Rugasira of Knight Frank

Interview with Judy Rugasira, Managing Director of Knight Frank Uganda

What are the main challenges that you are facing currently?

Obviously, the one that comes to mind right now is the COVID-19 crisis, which has totally and completely distorted the way we work and the way we are doing business. We were locked down for about four months, and have only just come back to working at full volumes as we were before and at the speeds that we were doing before. So, it has been a very distorted year. A lot of things have been reset. Business is not what it used to be. Activity has slowed down. Real estate, like any other sector, is a sector of the economy and once the economy is affected, the real estate sector is affected as well. The degree or the scale of the impact varies from sector to sector. But definitely, as a whole, the sector has been impacted, which means that our business has been impacted. Our headcount has been impacted in that we had to furlough some staff. We had to have contingency plans that were put in place to make sure that we ride the storm and stabilize the business and get the business up and running again during the difficult time of the lockdown period. And because our business is very much related to the success of our clients, we also had to accept and appreciate the fact that their businesses are suffering as well and that is going to impact us one way or another. If they cannot afford to pay their rent, if they cannot afford to reoccupy their offices, if our retailers cannot afford to trade because some of them are still locked down, such as cinemas, bars, some restaurants and some gyms, that is going to have an impact on a bigger scale on the retail sector as a whole. There have been quite a lot of interrelationships as to how the real estate sector has been impacted.

The other challenge is that business generally has been slowing down over the years in line with our economic performance. Real estate, as a sector, has had a pretty good run for the last ten or so years, but the last five years in general have been quite difficult and they tend to follow cycles with the election cycles as well. So, you will find that the year running up to the elections and the year after, we experience the hangover of the election campaign process where everything slows down, people are slow to make decisions, development projects are put on hold as they take a wait and see approach as to what is going to happen. And so, we have seen a slowdown generally in business from 2015. A lot of our real estate development was pegged on the oil and gas sector. When we discovered oil about 10 years ago, there was a lot of excitement, a lot of speculation, in terms of development, property development both residential and commercial, because we anticipated that the production was going to start pretty much immediately. So, there was a lot of speculative building in the office sector and in residential to a certain extent. Unfortunately, up to now, we have not yet quite started production. So, you can imagine the impact that has had on the sector as a whole, because it was one of those areas that was being looked at as a growth area that is going to derive a lot of demand for real estate, whether in the leasing sector, renting, or buying.

What are you doing to overcome these challenges?

We have been in the market in Uganda for 20 years and we have managed to take advantage or leverage off of that experience and our track record. It has been a journey of growth.

Obviously, this is not your typical crisis and there are no typical outcomes. Therefore, there are no typical mitigation measures that we can learn from in the past, apart from the one, the crisis that happened nearly 100 years ago. And obviously, things have changed drastically since then. So, it has really been more of a listen, take a deep think, and ponder on the things that are happening. In terms of business continuity, we were very fortunate that as a group, we are usually very quick to react to things like this. We tend to take a very realistic and deep look at our business and ask ourselves, how do we think we are going to be impacted? We will take three scenarios and we will work to those scenarios and we will put up contingency plans accordingly. As soon as we heard of the crisis, we then started putting contingency plans in place. We worked on three scenarios of what would happen, and this was long before the crisis had even become anything as serious as it is right now. And so, we put together a contingency plan for our business, whereby we anticipated a lockdown coming within 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. Fortunately, it came sooner rather than later. We were able to implement our contingency plan into an actual plan, as it were, in terms of numbers, how we furlough, and how we will continue operating our business from home. If we did have to work from home, we made sure everybody was set up to work from home virtually. We made sure we had a skeleton staff who could be able to access the office during the lockdown. That was really useful. In terms of our properties that we manage and those clients, we shared with them those contingency plans and how we anticipated the crisis affecting the management service that we offer for their properties. We really encouraged dialogue, talking, relationship building with them, because obviously, they were just as ignorant about everything as we were. Nobody knew what was happening. We had to take the lead as trusted advisors and assure them that their properties would be safe, that we would have people on site every time, all the time, and that we were able to put in place six months of contingency plans to make sure that business continued for them, their properties were safe, and everything continued as it was. However, it certainly is a learning curve every time because things change every time. The crisis takes a new dimension each time. So, we have to be alive and alert and move quite quickly. What is really key is the ability to be agile and flexible with our plans and be able to tweak them, to stop and change as we need to in order to make sure that we are keeping pace with the crisis and what it brings with it.

After a big crisis, the real estate sector often sees a big boom. Are you back to your figures that you had before the crisis or are you still down? What is the situation for you now?

The country is only just getting back on its feet and particularly with regards to real estate. Unlike many other countries in East Africa, Uganda was locked down the longest and fully locked down. Kenya did not have a full lockdown. Tanzania did not have a full lockdown. But, Uganda did. And for some sectors, this really went on for quite a while. The retail sector is not fully opened up yet and there are still some services that are not operational. Public transport was one of the last sectors to be opened up and that really impacted business, particularly in Kampala, which is the nerve center for business and the hive of business activity for the country. So, that really had an impact on the informal side of the economy. The informal sector is very, very big and that really is what drives economic activity for Kampala. When you have that locked down and people are unable to do their day to day chores and earn that wage every day, it is going to have a vicious cycle on how everything else operates. I would not say that we are up and running again to the levels that we were pre-COVID, but we are not as bad as we were during the lockdown. It is just a steady and a gradual comeback to business phase right now. People are starting to reoccupy their offices and we are working in shifts. Obviously, this has an impact on business. We still have a curfew, which also has another impact on business, particularly the hospitality sector, which is still really hard hit because airports are not opened up yet. We still have travel restrictions; although, these are going to end on the first of October. Children are able to go back to school starting on the 20th of September. So, these are all sectors of the economy that really are important cogs in that wheel and once the cogs are not all moving as they should be, there definitely is an impact on the general economy as a whole, and also impacting real estate because at the end of the day, people operate in buildings, in bricks and mortar. At the end of the day, there is bound to be a negative impact across the whole value chain.

Where are the areas where you feel that you have potential of success and growth? Where is the area that you want to push?

Without a doubt, we foresee a lot of growth in a couple of factors. 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 businesses 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.

Valuations is another service line that has grown and this is mainly on the back of the loan restructuring exercises that the banks have been doing. We have quite a robust and very respectable valuation team at Knight Frank. I am a chartered surveyor myself and my core competency is valuations. We have seen a lot of growth within the valuation side of things where we have been advising banks on how to deal with their distressed properties, also on the revaluation side of things, auctions and repossessions, management, and administration in some instances. So that area has also seen some upside from the crisis.

What are your competitive advantages? Why do clients come to you specifically over all of these other options that they have?

We have had the privilege of having first mover advantage. We have been in the market in Uganda for 20 years and we have managed to take advantage or leverage off of that experience and our track record. It has been a journey of growth. We started off with about seven of us in 2000, and we have grown to over 150 people in 2020. It has been a gradual, steady, consistent growth and service provision to this market. Secondly, the market has grown to trust us. Our core values at Knight Frank in Uganda center around integrity. That is a value that we really uphold. We work towards maintaining levels of integrity, professionalism, and certain ethical standards. We are a local outfit in Uganda in that we operate locally, but we work to global standards and we are connected globally. The third point is that we are a truly global company. We are very well networked and connected as one Knight Frank throughout the globe. We bring that international expertise and international standards to a market that is really still emerging. The market here is not nascent, per se. It has come a long way, but it is still developing and growing. There are many global brands which are becoming increasingly commonplace. But at Knight Frank, we do not occupy a place on the global stage just for the sake of it. We stand out and we want to make a difference in how we operate as Knight Frank, and the people that we employ are usually people that hold those same values, who appreciate principles of integrity, of diversity, of trust, of honesty, of going the extra mile to make sure that our clients are served, and bringing a human side to what we do. The market has grown to be very comfortable with us and that is a competitive advantage that we have. Personally, I have the advantage of being quite well connected with various clients in different places, which has given me a lot of leverage in terms of my corporate networks, being affiliated with many corporate organizations. There has been tangible growth that people have seen over the last 20 years and it has been growth on the on the back of hard work, consistency, and honesty. It has also given us that advantage whereby people know that there is a brand called Knight Frank, it is a strong brand, and it has a very good reputation. It truly does work at international standards. If we need to call on expertise that is not available here, we have a global network of 19,000 people out there in 517 offices across six continents. We are very connected. We have close networks. We also embrace technology. We simply try and give an exceptional service to clients.

What are you doing to embrace technology?

For example, on the agency side, we have started using virtual reality tools for some of the properties that we are managing. A client is now able to visit a property virtually and get an idea of what it looks like, because, obviously, at some point, we were not able to do physical inspections. Now, we can create virtual reality or CGI images, where people are able to visit our properties online and see what we have on offer. With regards to property management, we are able to remotely manage properties with the cloud-based software packages that we have in place. We can take this home and work from home and literally, at the touch of a button, ascertain if there is a problem at a property through our building management systems, or BMS. We are able to detect quickly and in real time where there could be a problem and where we need intervention all without necessarily being at the property. We are also embracing research and advisory. We have quite a lot of big data internally within our organization. We are able to drive data backed numbers and research that we have collected, analyze it, and put it out there as reports for our clients to read up on. For example, right after coming out of lockdown, we were able to put out a market sentiment survey very quickly as to what the market thought was going to happen with the working from home experience and experiment and coming back to the office. That gave us a very good idea and has actually been quite accurately reflected now as we go along. We were able to determine that 47% of our market thinks they will continue working from home and/or coming to the office. That enables us to put in place certain mechanisms. Are we able to cut costs in terms of the operations and expenses that we would be having at the properties? In that case, do we need all the manpower at the buildings that we did if it was 100% occupied? Are we able to scale back on our expenses? Being able to use technology to give us real time data and big data analytics has put us in good stead in terms of informing the market in real time what is happening and getting them to appreciate our service and our quality in that sense.

What drives you to do this work? What called you to the real estate sector?

Real estate was not my first calling. I initially thought I wanted to be a lawyer. My late father, and bless him wherever he is right now, told me, “There are many lawyers in this world. You are not going to make a difference and there are going to be millions more to come. Why don’t you go into a sector that is relatively new, where you can make a difference, as a woman and also as an expert?” So, I gave it some thought, and I ended up in real estate. When I got into the sector, I actually realized that I really enjoyed it, and for many reasons. First, it is not monotonous, because if it was, then I would have quit. I like change. I like different things. I like challenges. It is a very challenging sector. I went to study in the UK. I did both my secondary schooling and university in the UK and then I came back to Uganda. And what I expected and what I found were two totally different things, which added on to the challenge and the excitement. The real estate market was still very, very nascent. So, I realized I can make a difference to this market. If I take the expertise that I have gained, that I have learned, and I bring it into this market and work within the market to grow it and develop it, then that will provide a very interesting and exciting career and one that is also quite satisfying, because the results were tangible because we were starting off from a very, very low base. I felt that I was able to bring certain qualities to develop the market professionalism, and just changing the way things are done, improving communication with clients, being honest with them and straightforward, working with people closely, bringing a human side to the real estate or agency service line whereby it is not just driven by money, but it is more driven by relationships. And I found that it was actually making a very big difference and the market appreciated that. So, the more the market appreciated it, the more we grew, and the more successful we became.

And I realized I started having quite an impact as an individual and as an organization in the real estate sector. People were referring to me or deferring to me for advice and wanting to know how things are done. So, I really became more and more determined to change the way the market works, to develop the market, to grow the market, to train and nurture other people and my staff and the younger people who perhaps have not had an opportunity to go out and study real estate, but have an interest in it and a hobby and are also quite gifted and talented in certain attributes and aspects like selling skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills. For me, it has been a really long and interesting journey, where I am not only driven by the financial rewards of it, actually, it is more my impact. What impact am I having in the market? What legacy am I going to leave in the real estate sector of Uganda- whether that is transforming mindsets of landlords, transforming mindsets of clients, but most importantly, nurturing, mentoring, and growing the people that I work with? For me, that gives me the biggest satisfaction, more so than any financial reward that I can get. It is amazing to be training up people and watching them grow and coming to the top of their game and starting off as estate agents and now heading up departments and actually having a voice of their own and being experts in that field. Others have gone on to open competitive or competing brands to me, and it is so satisfying for me to watch these people who came in as trainees and are now actually out there competing with us. It is fantastic. And it is things like that that really give me a lot of joy and a lot of pride. Also, I genuinely enjoy working with people. Human beings by nature are good people, it just depends how you interact with them. If you do approach them with sincerity and honesty and trust, they have no option but to reciprocate. That is what has made my work really interesting and that is why I am still here. To a large extent, it is because of those little successes that we have gained.

What is your mission? What is the next step?

I want to continue growing naturally and developing people. Our country is still short of mentors, role models in the different sectors and I still have a lot of work to do in my sector in terms of mentoring, nurturing, and instilling certain principles about hard work. The younger generation, particularly the millennials in this country, want to get to the destination very, very quickly, without necessarily driving the journey. So, I still have a lot of work to do in imparting my leadership qualities, my real-life experiences of how I have gotten to where I have gotten to, and actually equipping them with the skills to get there also. It is not just telling a story and having a conversation, but actually equipping them, training them, developing them, by teaching them and training them with the skills that they require to become experts in what they are doing, and to get on top of their game. Trying to teach them that there are no shortcuts is quite difficult. I would like to spend the rest of my working life and when I do retire, God willing, just imparting my leadership skills, and helping people by encouraging them, training them, and impacting them positively to know that everybody can get there at the end of the day. It just takes hard work and certain skills and an attitude and a mindset that needs to change to get there. Unfortunately, our millennials here are very transient, very conditional. They want change very quickly. They want plug and play solutions to everything. They do not have the patience to stick it out. I am spending a lot of time on this point, not necessarily as a money-making initiative, but more on the CSR side of things.

Project yourself to the medium term, three years’ time. What do you want to have achieved?

Growth is growth and it will happen one way or another. For me, growing people is the most important thing. If I cannot leave a legacy of having left a certain number of people who are able to do what I have done, then I will have failed in my mission. I am creating KF Exceptional Academy within the organization, where we have picked out certain young leaders to personally nurture. It is my bigger CSR picture for the future. I am fast forwarding it within the organization and taking out a certain group who I have earmarked for quick succession planning into the KFX and trying to get them up there so that they are ambassadors for everybody else and I am trying to fast track their development by personally investing in them. Within three years, I would like to see at least 50 of our employees in that KFX Academy who are able to do what I am doing with ease. That is really one of my big ambitions.

I would also like to see further expansion countrywide and open a couple more branches within the country. This can be another extension of what I am doing here, taking these people out there to open up these branches so that they get practical, real time, on the ground leadership skills. The only way you can do that is by operating and running an office. If I can open up various branches out there and get them to go and head up those branches, then they will be very ready to come up into the leadership positions that are available. For me as a person, I would like to impact people. I would like to get into a bit more CSR. After a while, the rat race becomes boring, the bottom line becomes boring. And because you have achieved that, you start to ask more, how can I help people? How can I impact people’s lives positively? When I give management advice, business advice, and training and developing, that is really where I want my focus to be: on something that is more satisfying and enriching for me than just financial rewards. That is where I am looking to grow as a person in the next half of my life.

I am very passionate about this brand. I have worked with Knight Frank for 20 years. It is an incredible brand, it is a great place to be, it is a great place to work. I love the way they look after people and the importance they put on people. It is probably the one and only brand that I would work for, to be honest, and I feel very much a part of it. I never in my life imagined that I would be in the same job for 20 years and here I am. And yet, I am somebody who likes challenges and likes to be challenged. But I set myself the challenge, and they have let me grow within the confines and parameters of the organization’s ethics. I love working where I do and what a great brand it is. There are certain threads that are very common with people who work at Knight Frank. We are very people oriented and we put a lot of importance on relationships with people. That is really the code that binds us together as Knight Frank. We are independent. We are not a listed company. We are owned by partners so we cannot treat people like numbers, but treat them like individuals, with respect and value. Some other brands who have their clients as shareholders can bring in a conflict of interest at some point, because you are driven by the shareholders’ objectives at the end of the day.

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