Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 6

I N V E S T
&
d e v e l O P
THINK
BIG
The secret to successful property development is spotting opportunities before others do, seeing
potential in a place where others don’t. It’s about taking the gap, thinking out of the box, and a
whole lot of other clichés. And that’s just what Dennis Hope did more than three decades ago.
Of course, successful development is also about buying at a
low price, adding value, and selling at a high(er) price. Those
terms are all relative, of course. Developers may buy land at
what seems like a high price but, by carefully adding value
without too much expenditure, they can still sell at an even
higher price. But Dennis Hope did even better. He ‘bought’ for
nothing, paid almost nothing to ‘add value’ and sold – well – at
not that high a cost, but his mark-up was 100%. It was the classic
low-cost, high-volume business model.
Right place, right time
Property development is about cashing in on opportunities
– and truly great ones only come around rarely. Take, for
instance, Africa. Well, you can’t just take Africa – at least
not now – and, in theory, not after the Berlin Conference of
1885. This august gathering of European leaders got together
specifi cally to thrash out how best to ‘manage’ Africa. Of
course, no Africans were invited and, in hindsight, that is
acknowledged to have been an oversight. But all agreements