Cactus Green Housing Project
Situation
Real estate is a critical component of the Rwandan economy. Despite limited space, there is a growing demand for housing within the capital city, and space-consuming, traditional houses are the most common housing unit found. The demand for affordable housing grows in Rwanda at a steady pace, increasing the opportunity for large housing projects that can provide solutions to issues of space and cost. Often businesses and projects also fail to provide environmental sustainability and social impact design.
Horizon Group established Green Rock Iwacu Ltd. to lead the Cactus Green project, creating green housing that ultimately makes housing more affordable, and creating community spaces to positively impact the families and communities within each building. It will also incorporate apartment housing into the city of Kigali, a shift that will require careful marketing to change the current pull towards traditional houses.
Karisimbi Partners’ Approach
Karisimbi Partners was engaged by one of the largest real estate developers in Rwanda to build the business plan for a 50 million USD mixed-use environmentally sustainable master planned community. Our work involved in-depth market research and scenario modeling. Karisimbi Partners began by stabilizing and refocusing the project, determining that if this could become economically sound, it would have an immense impact on Kigali. KBP developed a vision statement, to further define the project and show how this model could succeed in a demanding market. Contributing significant fact-finding work and business analysis to understand this sector of work, KBP also developed a variety of models for the housing project. In-depth market research discovered significant information for Cactus Green about ways to improve the marketability of their buildings. Analyzing their sales strategy, hiring strategy, and marketability due to underlying factors revealed unknown strengths and weaknesses on which KBP could capitalize and advise respectively.
Results
The Horizon Group will begin construction in 2019, and finish the sale of every house and apartment by 2023. Their strategies relating to sales, marketing, hiring, and construction were significantly impacted by the analysis done by Karisimbi, allowing this project to become more economically sound. Ultimately, KBP created a 20% increase on profits.