Notes from the desk.

Intela has formalised its collaboration with Reclon Consulting Engineers into a joint venture across real estate and renewable energy. Mechanical and electrical scope is where development programmes are most often lost — so we have stopped treating it as something procured at the end of a design process.

Pension funds must hold 20 per cent of assets in prescribed assets, life assurers 15 per cent and short-term insurers 10 per cent. None of the three sectors is compliant. The shortfall in pensions alone runs to roughly a quarter of a billion US dollars — capital that is legally required to be deployed and currently is not.

A 34-unit gated townhouse development on a 1.2-hectare freehold site in Bulawayo’s Suburbs precinct, available off-plan from US$200,000 with completion estimated November 2027. The particulars, and the reasoning behind them.

Zimbabwe’s property market is repricing — not by much in headline terms, but decisively in composition. Yield dispersion is inverted against risk, the CBD decline is structural rather than cyclical, and the capital stack has moved from banks to institutions.

The argument usually made for Bulawayo is that property there is cheap. That is an accurate observation and a weak investment case. The better argument is about basis — and about five gazetted Special Economic Zones.

The revision of Zimbabwe’s net metering threshold from 100kW to 5MW converted a domestic rooftop scheme into a mechanism capable of underwriting industrial-scale generation — without a power purchase agreement with a utility that cannot reliably pay in hard currency.

Zimbabwe has 174 licensed independent power producers. Sixty-eight of them generate electricity. That ratio explains almost everything about how competition among developers actually works — and competitive bidding from 2026 is about to redistribute the advantage.

Our purpose is stated in five words. This article explains where the thought comes from, what it commits us to, how we are organised, and the four principles we operate by.