ARCE 2026 Speaker Spotlight: Martin Uche on Why 94% of Africa’s Property Markets Are Flying Blind

ARCE 2026 Speaker Spotlight

Lagos, Nigeria — 15 September 2026 · Property News Africa is an Official Digital Media Partner of ARCE 2026

Ask Martin Uche why so many African property projects underperform and he will not talk about interest rates or currency. He will talk about a Grade A office tower planned for a location with no Grade A tenants, and a developer who was about to overpay for a Lagos plot by millions of dollars — both, he says, avoidable with numbers that already existed. Uche is founder, CEO and research director of Fortren & Company, a Lagos-based research and advisory firm that tracks rents, sales prices, occupancy, absorption and development pipelines across African markets for developers, institutional investors and development finance institutions.

He speaks at the Africa Real Estate Conference & Expo in Accra on 14–16 October. Ahead of that, Property News Africa asked him how bad the continent’s data gap really is, what it costs, where reliable numbers come from when registries are patchy, and what AI can and cannot fix. His answers, lightly edited, are below.

Speaker snapshot

Fortren & Company and the path into real estate data

Property News Africa: Tell us briefly about Fortren & Company and your path into real estate data, and what the firm does for institutions and investors today.

Martin Uche: Before founding Fortren & Company I spent over a decade working in African real estate data and research for multiple companies, particularly focusing on the West African market. Across those experiences, I saw the same recurring problem: decision-makers are building projects and setting their investment strategies with too little reliable information. I founded Fortren & Company to close that gap — to help institutions doing real estate and construction business in Africa better understand the market and make data-driven decisions.

Today, our work with real estate institutions and investors usually comes down to one of four things. First, clients come to us before they commit capital to a project, because they need an objective assessment of the viability of the opportunity. Second, service providers come to us for intelligence on deals and off-market opportunities. Third, some clients have the capital, the landed asset or the idea, but no local partner to execute it, so we connect them with the right partners. Fourth, institutional investors come to us to guide their expansion across multiple African markets. All of this is possible because of the data, relationships and context we have gathered on the market for over a decade.

How bad is the data gap?

PNA: How bad is the data gap in African real estate right now, which markets or asset classes are best and worst served, and what does that gap actually cost investors and developers?

MU: Data plays a huge role in determining market transparency or opacity, and to understand the data gap in Africa I usually point people to JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index. There are five levels: highly transparent, transparent, semi-transparent, low transparency and opaque. Think of it as a five-point grading system.

In the 2024 report, only South Africa made it into the transparent category. Kenya and Mauritius made it to semi-transparent. That means 94% of Africa’s real estate markets have low transparency or are completely opaque. Regionally, South and East Africa are a lot more advanced than the rest of the continent. Many markets in West, North and Central Africa lag behind, including Nigeria and Ghana.

From an asset-class standpoint, most research interest has focused on the traditional sectors: office, hospitality, residential and retail. Alternative or emerging sectors — REITs, student housing, flexible office, healthcare real estate, data centres — get far less attention and are more opaque, which is where we are more focused.

That opacity means real estate decisions get made on wrong assumptions, which can hurt the performance of projects and the market. When developers and investors do not have visibility into current and historic performance across key indicators — achievable rents, sales prices, occupancy rates, absorption timelines, development pipeline and stock — they cannot objectively evaluate how their projects will perform, and they cannot see where the real opportunities are.

Editor’s note: JLL’s 2024 index scores 89 countries; only a subset are African. Its summary confirms South Africa as the region’s sole “Transparent” market and notes improvement in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana from a low base. The 94% figure is Uche’s calculation based on the African markets JLL covers.

Where data changed the outcome

PNA: Can you walk us through one or two practical cases where market data materially changed the outcome?

MU: There are many instances, but I will focus on the outcomes. We have used our data to guide negotiations that saved clients over $3 million they could have overpaid for a piece of land in Lagos. We have also used our data to redirect over $50 million that could have been invested in the wrong location. In that case the client had acquired land and wanted to build a Grade A office building in a location that does not have Grade A tenants. The project could have failed, but we used our data to ground the proposed development in what the location could actually support.

Editor’s note: these outcomes are as described by Fortren & Company and could not be independently verified.

Where reliable numbers come from — and what AI can do with them

PNA: Where does reliable data come from in markets where much of the activity is informal and public registries are patchy, and what role do you see for AI and PropTech in closing the gap versus where the hype is running ahead of what’s usable?

MU: Most of the data we work with is sourced through primary research — leg work — and trusted relationships built in the industry over the years. Even then, we still have to independently verify it. When I think about AI and PropTech, I see the most opportunity in using them to structure and clean large datasets, and to extract meaningful insights and patterns from the data. There is also a lot of use in data scraping, but with a limitation: most of the information you see publicly is often misrepresented and misleading, and therefore still requires independent verification.

The most common mistake: building on optimism

PNA: What are the most common mistakes you see investors make with data, either ignoring it or trusting the wrong numbers?

MU: I have seen an alarming number of developers build projects on optimism or the wrong assumptions. They build without evaluating their projects objectively against key market indicators — achievable rents, sales prices, occupancy rates, absorption timelines, development pipeline and stock — to see how the project would perform in the market.

This typically ends the same way: project underperformance. Either they build something not aligned with what the market needs, or they experience avoidable delays, or the asset becomes too expensive or difficult to exit. What we do at Fortren & Company is use the data we have been tracking over the years to help clients make informed decisions and build projects that are aligned with the market.

The one message for Accra

PNA: What’s the one message you want ARCE delegates to leave your session with, and who should make a point of attending?

MU: The key message is that Africa can build better with the right data — better projects, better real estate, better economies — if we let the right data guide our approach to projects and policies. I encourage anyone interacting with the real estate and construction sector in Africa to attend: renters, buyers, operators and developers, institutional and high-net-worth investors, DFIs, government officials, policymakers and regulators.

Editor

See Full Bio