South African property developer Brett Abrahamse is bringing Hilton into Zimbabwe for the first time

Hilton will open its first hotel in Zimbabwe, and has signed an agreement with Terrace Africa for a 140-room Hilton Garden Inn in Harare's Highlands district.

The announcement came on Aug. 26 at ZimReal, Zimbabwe's property investment forum. The hotel is scheduled to open in early 2029 and will be the first Hilton-branded property ever to operate in the country. South Africa has ten.

It will anchor the Highlands Precinct, a mixed-use development Terrace Africa is building that combines offices, retail, dining, residences, hotels and conferencing space. The site sits 20 to 25 kilometres from Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport in an established residential and diplomatic district, and the hotel will carry an all-day restaurant with a terrace, a lobby café and bar, a gym, a pool with terrace and meeting rooms.

Carlos Khneisser, Hilton's chief development officer for the Middle East and Africa, said Zimbabwe recorded more than 1.7 million international arrivals in 2025 and that Harare's role as a commercial, diplomatic and regional gateway supports demand from business and leisure travellers.

It is the first significant hotel development in Harare in years, in a capital short of quality rooms. Hilton runs more than 70 hotels across Africa with over 100 in its pipeline, more than half of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Twenty-eight, and out on his own

Brett Abrahamse is South African, and he founded Terrace Africa in 2011 at 28.

He had studied for a B.Comm Honours in financial analysis at Stellenbosch, then completed the property development programme at the University of Cape Town's business school. Property was already familiar. His father and uncle were both quantity surveyors and he grew up on building sites.

"My dad and uncle were both quantity surveyors and I grew up around property and construction," he said in a 2024 interview.

His first job was at Liberty Properties and STANLIB, among the largest property owners in South Africa, where he ran business development for the property portfolio for six years. He was part of the team that listed Letlole La Rona on the Botswana Stock Exchange, and won new business in Zambia, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique and Swaziland before he turned 30.

He left in 2011 and started two companies at once, Terrace Africa and API Events.

The developer began as an advisory business, raised its own capital, and moved into building retail centres across the Southern African Development Community. It added property management, leasing and asset management in-house and sells those as services to others. The company now employs 21 people from offices in Harare and Johannesburg, and has delivered more than $230 million of projects across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa.

The South African Council of Shopping Centres gave him its Young Achiever award, at the same ceremony that honoured the former Shoprite chief executive Whitey Basson.

Betting on Zimbabwe when few others would

Zimbabwe was the choice that separated him from his peers.

Terrace Africa opened Village Walk in Harare in 2017 and the numbers came back better than anything else it owned.

"If I am to judge the performance in terms of yield, it has outperformed other assets within the region," Abrahamse said. "We're getting amazing returns there."

The first projects were funded locally. That changed in 2020, when the company decided Zimbabwe would be central to the business and obtained a licence from the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency allowing it to bring capital in from offshore.

He has been consistent about what the market requires.

"Patience and perseverance are key to succeeding in Africa," he said in an early interview.

Building a stock exchange listing from nothing

The move that made his name in Harare was financial rather than architectural.

Terrace Africa listed the Tigere Property Fund on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in November 2022, the country's first exchange-traded real estate investment trust. The offer put 255.3 million units on sale at 28 dollars each out of 719,323,000 available. Abrahamse was 38, co-founded the fund, and remains the common director between it and Terrace Africa, which acts as asset manager.

The structure solved a real problem. Zimbabwean pension funds wanting property exposure had been forced to buy buildings outright and carry the liquidity risk. The REIT gave them something they could trade.

Tigere started with a net asset value of $22.2 million and now holds Highland Park, Chinamano Corner and the Greenfields Shopping Complex. Highland Park's first phase opened with 27 retail units across more than 6,000 square metres, anchored by Pick n Pay alongside Puma and Simbisa. The fund pays dividends quarterly in hard currency, and Abrahamse has been pushing it toward a $100 million portfolio.

Developing in Zimbabwe means doing work that governments handle elsewhere. Terrace Africa is widening a kilometre of Emmerson Mnangagwa Road to absorb the traffic Highland Park generates.

"This should be the responsibility of other departments outside Tigere, but we can't wait," he said. "We want to get the benefits of the rental turnover now, and often that needs to be factored into these developments."

Five years to the Hilton signature

The Highlands Precinct has been in development since roughly 2019. Abrahamse described it publicly two years ago as a project the company had been working on for over five years that was finally becoming real.

"These are the projects you dream about as a property developer," he wrote at the time.

The Hilton agreement gives it an international anchor, which changes what the rest of the precinct can charge and who it can attract.

"Our Highlands Precinct has been designed as a connected urban destination that reflects Harare's growth and evolving lifestyle needs," Abrahamse said. "Partnering with Hilton to introduce its first hotel in Zimbabwe is a defining milestone for the precinct."

Persuading a global hotel group to commit to Zimbabwe is not a small achievement. The country spent two decades outside most international investment mandates, and a South African developer has done what no international hotel chain would do on its own, which is put a global brand into Harare.

Neither party disclosed the value of the agreement or how the hotel will be financed.