Uganda’s real estate sector is an emerging market which is currently still in its infancy and one of the safest fields of investment in Uganda and has continued to grow at 5.6% over the last 4 years. The real estate in Uganda has grown tremendously over the past decade with many residential homes, business premises and office blocks being set up especially in the Kampala Area.
Characteristics Real Estate Sector
- The sector does have big residential estates
- Majority of the residential houses have been put by individuals mainly for rental purposes
- A number of office blocks have built in various areas around the city
- Most of the buildings in the Central Business District are being converted into medium size shopping malls.
- There is only one bank which is specializing in mortgage finance
- There a lot of demand for low income housing estates
- The number of players are still too few and many of them small
Market for real estate sector in Uganda
The key drivers for demand for property development include the following;
- Growth in population
- Remittances from people living abroad
- The steady economic growth for Uganda
- The conducive environment has attracted foreigners to buy houses and settle in Uganda.
Investment opportunities in the sector
- Provision of housing and mortgage finance
- Provision of low cost housing in Urban and semi urban
- Provision of construction equipment and manufacturing of building materials
- Manufacture of prefabricated concrete systems, processing of no metallic minerals to make tiles
Challenges
- High cost of funding
- Lack of adequate funding to the sector
- Expensive land in urban areas
- The slow process of stream lining the land registry
- Lack of adequate well trained and experienced manpower to manage the sector