Real estate: How to own prime real estate without breaking the bank

You earn shs2,000,000 but your residential rent is shs500,000 and the rest of your monthly bills like transport, electricity, water, and entertainment (beer and girls) take up the rest of your salary. You live from paycheck to paycheck yet you dream of owning a home of your own and a commercial building in a developed suburb of the capital.

Houses-in-Uganda Pulse

You think it would take a miracle to jump from where you are to where you wanna be but it is practically achieveable according to a Kampala real estate expert.

Just like in every venture in life, starting small is the trick if you want to succeed in the real estate game. To own the kind of home in the kind of neighborhood that gets your engine running demands patience and foresight according to expert real estate dealer, Cissy Namaganda.

Cissy Namaganda runs a successful real estate company that mostly makes its money by shouldering the burden of constructing clients' homes while they go on with their busy schedules uninterrupted. She believes that Uganda's middle class has the wrong attitude about real estate and this has caused many to become perpetual tenants needlessly.

"If you can afford to rent a house of shs500,000, then you can afford to own a house in Kampala," she asserts.

The question is how, right? Well, she says that many members of the young corporate class waste years of their working life waiting to hit a big deal before they can afford to buy a house of shs200 million in a nice suburb. Namaganda says that is the wrong way of looking at it, and many who think like this may never get to live their dream.

Plots for sale in obscure villages Pulse

Her advice is to find a place far away from the city, buy a plot of shs 4 million in some obscure village, fence it, plant trees in it and leave it alone for a few years. You can even build a small house in it and put a tenant in it just to secure the land.

New developements in Matugga Pulse

"Land never loses values, that is what we all need to remember," she says. "Land always gains value and the land you bought at shs 4 million four years ago, can be sold at 20 million today depending on many factors."

She adds, "With 20 million, you can get land a lot closer to the city than your initial plot. If you have a few plots of this nature, or if you continue with this trend, you will finally land on an opportunity to buy a plot of land or a house in a developed suburb that suits your taste."

The plan is to make the first step of owning a piece of soil somewhere, anywhere. With time, that land gains value. You sell the plot in Bulemeezi and buy another in Gayaza. After a few more years, you sell the Gayaza plot and buy another in Kira until you finally buy a home in Kisaasi or whichever suburb you want.

This way may take a while, but it will happen for you, for sure.