While industry leaders are calling for bold innovation in property investment, systemic challenges in land administration continue to hinder progress and erode investor confidence. At the recent real estate conference and expo hosted by Letlole La Rona (LLR), the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Kamogelo Mowaneng, highlighted the need for the property sector to “move beyond conversations” and take action in addressing the economic and operational obstacles affecting growth. “It’s not business as usual; we’ve never had, for example, a cost of funding of 16%. We’re shocked. How do we navigate that? That’s our reality, so we need to be more creative in our funding structures to maintain long-term value,” she said. The LLR CEO urged delegates to leave the conference with practical solutions and a renewed conviction that real estate is a “driver of inclusive national and regional growth”.
Yet, that vision stands on shaky ground if the country’s land registration system continues to lag. During a panel discussion on conveyancing, Kennedy Kgabo, the deputy registrar from the Department of Land and Agriculture, outlined the growing strain they are facing. “One of our core challenges is that we are still very much substantially manual. This results in delays in the retrieval of documents and in processing transactions. Conveyancers have to come through physically to lodge their documents, and if there are issues, they must come back to rectify them,” he said. The pressure on the registry has grown exponentially since the 2017 Deeds Registry (Amendment) Act and the 2018 Tribal Land Act came into effect, mandating the registration of tribal land. “Tribal land accounts for about 70% of all land in Botswana,” the deputy registrar explained. “This has increased our workload from about 9,000 to 30,000 transactions annually, but we have not been given any additional resources.”
