African real estate trends have long been centred on the continent’s geography. Which country is hot, which city is next. Nigeria is cited for its large and rapidly growing population, Kenya gets the spotlight for its tech scene, while South Africa is treated as the mature, “safe” bet.
It’s a neat way to talk about a versatile continent. According to a new piece of research, we should be looking at something different, though.
The Broll Africa Real Estate Intelligence Report 2026, compiled by pan-African property services group Broll Property Group, makes the case that geography alone no longer explains where property money is heading. Rather, we should focus on what connects the dots between the places, such as trade routes, energy grids, migration patterns, ports, fibre lines and industrial zones.
The report will be unveiled at the Africa Property Investment (API) Summit in Cape Town on 17 and 18 September and presented by Wayne Godwin, the managing director of Broll Hospitality.
Rather than ranking countries against one another, the report starts with the four global forces reshaping economies everywhere, then asks how they collide on the continent. The forces are demographic change, geopolitical realignment, the energy transition and the twin rise of digitisation and artificial intelligence. None of the ideas is new by itself.
Take population growth, the statistic Africa gets sold on more than any other. More people should mean more households, workers, shoppers and, therefore, more demand for housing, offices and malls. The report says population growth counts toward property only once jobs, infrastructure and connectivity are in place too. A booming city with no reliable power and functioning logistics network isn’t an opportunity yet. Layer the energy transition on top of that and the corridor logic starts to make sense. The global push towards cleaner energy is increasing demand for Africa’s minerals, among them copper, nickel, cobalt and manganese), while artificial intelligence is creating a tenant type that barely existed a decade ago — the data centre — which needs mega amounts of reliable, affordable power.
Put a mine, a power project, a port and a data hub within reach of one another and you’ve built an investment corridor. These are real estate opportunities that make sense only when you look at the whole chain.
The report identifies six corridors across the continent. Each is scored on what’s standing, the deal activity feeding it, the infrastructure and resources behind it, the risks and what all that could mean for housing, warehousing, hotels and digital infrastructure along the route.
In office markets, tenants are trading space for quality. They are squeezing into fewer, newer buildings that cost less to run, tick sustainability boxes and can be reconfigured easily, rather than taking whatever space or incentives are on offer.
South Africa remains the continent’s biggest institutional office market and Kenya has the fullest pipeline of new stock coming through. The surprise in the data is Zambia, which the report flags as having one of the tightest, most landlord-friendly supply-demand balances of any market it surveyed.
Then there’s the retail sector. A big, growing consumer base doesn’t automatically translate into a thriving shopping centre. Retail property performance is determined by whether the tenant mix suits the neighbourhood, whether rents are affordable, how much competing space is being built and whether developers show restraint.
Logistics and industrial property are riding the same trade and infrastructure wave on which the corridors are built. Research identifies them as one of the continent’s most resilient property sectors.
Then there’s data centres. South Africa has roughly 80 megawatts of live, commercial colocation capacity, compared with Kenya’s 15MW but Kenya has a further 80MW of announced pipeline capacity in development, compared with 60MW in South Africa, a sign of where momentum in the sector is moving.
Purpose-built student housing remains undersupplied, running above 90% occupancy in most of the markets studied. Hospitality is riding on the coattails of everything else — business travel, mining and infrastructure activity — with Nigeria sitting on a pipeline of more than 9 000 branded hotel rooms to be built.
Now let’s talk about Reits. A Reit (real estate investment trust) is a listed company that owns and manages income-generating property on shareholders’ behalf. It’s one of the main conduits through which everyday investment capital reaches large commercial buildings worldwide and it’s a decent proxy for how mature a country’s property investment market really is.
South Africa has 33 of them, worth a combined R333.56 billion. Kenya has three, Nigeria four and Uganda and Mozambique none. Even in markets where Reit legislation exists on paper, limited liquidity, thin institutional investor pools and low public awareness hold back adoption.
The gap could become an important differentiator in determining which corridors develop fastest. People want real estate but this is about whether there’s a working channel for money to reach it.
“The opportunity in Africa has always been substantial but the way we understand that opportunity needs to evolve,” says Malcolm Horne, the group CEO of Broll Property Group. “You have to look at countries and cities but on their own they tell you very little. More and more, it’s the connections that count — between energy and industry, ports and logistics, cities and migration, infrastructure and investment.”
Murray Anderson, the managing director of API Events, the company behind the summit where the report will be launched, frames the changes as a rise in the sophistication of the questions being asked.
“Investors are looking beyond headline growth rates and asking harder questions about infrastructure, capital, connectivity, demand and risk,” he says. “It gives the market a way to think about where growth is coming from, how it is travelling across the continent and what that means for the built environment”
The question — how growth reaches the built environment — runs through much of what else is on the table at this year’s API Summit. The V&A Waterfront, for instance, has its own session unpacking the next phase of a precinct that’s become a continental benchmark for mixed-use development. Its masterplan is pegged at between R30bn and R40bn, playing out over roughly the next 15 years.
Growthpoint Properties and Etana Energy are walking through how a 2023 pilot project has grown into South Africa’s first live, pooled renewable-electricity wheeling arrangement, supplying an entire Cape Town property portfolio. A separate panel is examining how African pension funds are evolving from passive capital allocators into active co-developers of buildings.
None of this makes African real estate any less risky. The report is candid that regulatory conditions, institutional capacity and political stability vary enormously from market to market and capital-market depth, not just demand, will determine which corridors deliver.
But for anyone trying to make sense of where property money is heading on this continent next, “which country” was probably not the right strategy for analysing the flow of investment. “Which corridor” is perhaps a better way to look at it.