Broll report: Africa's property investment is shifting from countries to corridors
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The Broll Africa Real Estate Intelligence Report 2026 argues property money now follows investment corridors — trade routes, energy grids and infrastructure — rather than individual countries.
African real estate trends have long been centred on the continent's geography — which country is hot, which city is next. A new report from pan-African property services group Broll Property Group makes the case that geography alone no longer explains where property money is heading.
The Broll Africa Real Estate Intelligence Report 2026 argues investors should focus on what connects the dots between 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, presented by Wayne Godwin, managing director of Broll Hospitality.
The report starts with four global forces reshaping economies — demographic change, geopolitical realignment, the energy transition and the rise of digitisation and artificial intelligence — and asks how they collide on the continent. It identifies six corridors, each scored on existing stock, deal activity, infrastructure and risk.
In office markets, tenants are trading space for quality, squeezing into fewer, newer buildings that cost less to run. South Africa remains the continent's biggest institutional office market and Kenya has the fullest pipeline of new stock coming through. Zambia is flagged as having one of the tightest, most landlord-friendly supply-demand balances of any market surveyed.
Logistics and industrial property are riding the same trade and infrastructure wave on which the corridors are built, and are identified as one of the continent's most resilient property sectors. Purpose-built student housing remains undersupplied, running above 90% occupancy in most markets studied.
On data centres, South Africa has roughly 80 megawatts of live commercial colocation capacity compared with Kenya's 15MW, though Kenya has a further 80MW of announced pipeline capacity in development, compared with 60MW in South Africa. Hospitality is riding on business travel, mining and infrastructure activity, with Nigeria sitting on a pipeline of more than 9,000 branded hotel rooms to be built.