Africa: Are gated serviced farms the next new real estate trend?

In several African cities such as Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Lusaka, urban agriculture is slowly taking root as households seek to improve their access to food and generate supplementary income.

In Kenya’s capital Nairobi, dwellers previously used their backyards to grow vegetables and keep chickens. But due to increasing pressure on land most of these suburbs are now dotted with multi-storey apartment blocks. Even in standalone houses, developers are either doing away with those backyards or making them smaller.

Kenyan-based real estate agency, Hass Consult, has developed a farming real estate project located in Esidai, outside Nairobi, targeted at urban and middle-class farmers. The company acquired a 100-acre plot, and is putting in infrastructure such as water for irrigation, fencing, roads and electricity. The serviced farm will be sold in 4-acre parcels.

A gated farm project
Hass Consult CEO Farhana Hassanali-Hashmani says the project is bringing together two industries: real estate which has been booming for years, and agriculture where more needs to be done. She notes a similar hybrid between the hotel and real estate industries has been successful with a number of serviced apartments now in operation in Nairobi.

She notes it is also a route to property ownership for buyers who don’t have money to buy or build a house right away. They can take advantage of a good road network, a ready market in Nairobi and even proximity to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport if they want to export produce and generate income as they save and plan to build a home in the future.

Hass Consult is also hoping to attract restaurants and hotels which often cite access to fresh produce as a challenge. According to Hassanali-Hashmani, the Esidai area is conducive to growing a variety of crops such as tomatoes, onions, watermelons, peppers, cabbages and mangoes.

Kenyan urban dwellers are often still tied to their rural homes where they have extended family and some own inherited land. But engaging in commercial farming is “tedious”, Hassanali-Hashmani says, because the farms are often a long distance away and infrastructure poor.

Source: howwemadeitinafrica.com