Building places our people prefer

Building places our people prefer

Our purpose is stated in five words. The formulation is adapted from British Land's "places people prefer", and the adaptation is the point.

Most property companies describe themselves by what they build. We describe ourselves by what happens after we leave. That shifts the test of success from delivery to preference, from whether a scheme completed to whether people choose it and keep choosing it. It is the harder measure and the correct one for an investment firm rather than a contractor. A development can complete on programme and on budget and still be a poor asset. Preference produces occupancy, occupancy produces income, and income is what an investor owns.

The word "our" is not decoration. Intela operates in a specific place, for specific people. Bulawayo is not a generic market and Matabeleland is not an abstraction. The people whose preferences we set out to satisfy are our neighbours, and in several cases our families. That is a discipline as much as a sentiment. It makes it materially harder to justify a scheme that transfers value from a community to a balance sheet.

What this requires of us

Three commitments follow, and each carries a cost.

We invest in the specification others cut. Preference is decided by the parts of a building experienced daily rather than photographed once. At Landau Village that means energy-efficient lighting throughout, solar-powered security lighting, contemporary power provision including USB charging, generous parking, landscaped communal space and a residents' gymnasium. None of it drives a headline sales figure. All of it determines whether a resident stays for ten years or three.

We take a long view of ownership. We are an asset management firm, not a merchant developer. We originate and structure projects and we hold them through their working life. On our renewable energy work the principle is contractual: Intela invests its own capital alongside institutional partners and takes the asset management mandate. A developer who exits at practical completion and an owner who holds for twenty-five years make different specification decisions. We prefer to make the second kind.

We solve infrastructure once, properly, at scale. Zimbabwe's municipal servicing is unreliable. The useful response is not to complain about it but to design around it. A gated scheme can deliver water, power and security for thirty-four households more cheaply and more reliably than thirty-four households can deliver it for themselves. Our renewable energy division exists in part because our real estate division kept meeting the same problem.

How we are organised

We run two divisions and one advisory practice.

Real Estate covers land assembly and acquisition, master planning, development management, residential and mixed-use delivery, and long-term asset management. Our flagship is Project Landau Village, a 34-unit gated townhouse scheme on Park Road in Bulawayo's Suburbs precinct.

Renewable Energy covers utility-scale and distributed solar photovoltaic development, from site selection and resource assessment through licensing, grid connection, structuring and operation. We hold a national solar land bank of approximately 130 hectares. Our current programme includes a phased 1MW to 6MW institutional solar development structured for pension fund investment under Zimbabwe's prescribed asset framework.

Advisory covers commercial and financial structuring, investment committee documentation and capital raising for third parties across both sectors.

Since 2026 both divisions have operated in joint venture with Reclon Consulting Engineers, a Zimbabwean engineering and development consultancy in practice since 1995, with offices in Bulawayo and Harare and more than eighteen engineers, technicians and support staff. That partnership places mechanical, electrical and project management capability inside our origination process rather than appointing it afterwards.

Our operating principles

Evidence before conviction. We publish our workings. Our investment proposals carry stated assumptions, sensitivity analysis across downside, base and upside cases, and an explicit statement of what would have to be true for the case to fail. A risk summary that reads as entirely positive is not credible, and we do not produce them.

Capital alongside capital. Where we ask an institution to invest, we invest ourselves. Alignment is demonstrated by exposure, not asserted in a covering letter.

Institutional standards, local knowledge. The two are frequently presented as a trade-off. They are not. We hold ourselves to the analytical and documentary standards of the international managers whose research we read, LaSalle, CBRE, Knight Frank, Hines and British Land, and we apply them to a market those firms do not cover in depth. The standards travel. The judgement has to be local.

Say what is uncertain. Zimbabwe is a market in which confident forecasting is usually a sign of insufficient attention. Where we do not know, we say so, and we set out what we would need to observe in order to know.

Working with us

We act for institutional investors and capital partners, including pension funds, insurers, family offices and development finance institutions, and for land and property clients across Matabeleland and the Midlands.

If you would like to discuss a mandate, a site or a co-investment, we would be glad to hear from you.

Tanaka Dube,

Managing Director

Intela Land and Property (Private) Limited is registered in Zimbabwe, company number 8966A1032026.