Field Notes · 26 October 2026
Most of the lodges, camps and beach properties I have watched change hands in Tanzania and Zanzibar over the past thirty-odd years were never advertised. The reason has less to do with secrecy than with how ownership here has always worked. An owner who lets it be known that his camp is for sale tells his staff, his competitors and his bank something he would rather they did not hear. So the conversation happens quietly, among the operators, guides, lawyers and contractors who already know the asset, long before anything resembling a sale is put in writing.
Buyers who come to us have usually looked already — the property sites, two or three agents, an introduction through a friend of a friend. Most of them have concluded, reasonably enough on the evidence, that very little of interest is available, when what they have actually found is the small part of the market that someone chose to list, which here bears little relation to what is changing hands.
The international firms an investor would naturally call first are not much help either, through no particular fault of their own. They work to mandate criteria built for institutional stock: clean title documentation, accounts in a form they can underwrite, and a deal size that justifies running a formal process. That filter, sensible as it is for the markets it was designed around, sets aside most of what is worth having here. It rules out the family-owned camp that has traded well for twenty years without ever producing accounts anyone in London would recognise, the half-built resort whose owner has run out of money or patience, and the beachfront parcel whose right of occupancy is sound but whose paperwork sits three transfers behind where it ought to be.
The people who do know about these assets are rarely the people placed to judge them, and in a market this size every serious lodge and beach holding is known to a few dozen of them. The guide who mentions over dinner that a camp might be available has seldom read the lease. He has no particular reason to have established whether the concession renews on transfer or lapses with the current holder, or whether the operating figures describe a business or the way of life of the family that runs it. Buyers who act on the introduction alone tend to discover the difference somewhere between paying the deposit and the end of their second year of ownership, which is the most expensive point at which to find it.
When I look at an asset of this kind there is rarely a data room or a vendor pack to work from, so the assessment starts with the ground and the paper and works outwards. Title and tenure come first: the term remaining, who sits behind the lease as grantor, and whether a change of ownership triggers a consent that someone will have to go and obtain. Then the permissions — what was approved, what was built regardless, and how far apart the two have drifted over the years. Then the operating logic: whether there is an operator in place, whether the management arrangement survives a sale, and what it costs to run the asset at the standard its asking price assumes. The last question, and the one that most often decides the matter, is the exit — who would buy this from you in five years' time, and on what terms.
An institutional investor would recognise every item on that list. What differs here is when the work has to happen. With the assets unlisted, it cannot wait for a transaction to justify it, and has to be done in advance, on sites that may never come to market and for buyers who have not yet appeared. It draws on knowing the operators and the circuits, and on years spent running lodges and building one. That teaches you quickly which figures in a camp's accounts can be relied upon and which were written for a buyer.
For anyone looking to buy here, searching harder will not produce the asset. The camps and parcels worth having are held by people rather than listed on platforms. Reaching them depends on being someone those people have reason to call, a position built over years and impossible to arrange at the point of need. It is the position we work from, and by the time we put a site in front of a buyer, the assessment has usually been done.
Field Notes is written from the desk of the brokerage: occasional pieces on how this market actually transacts. Nothing published here refers to a live or identifiable mandate.
Beach & Bush handles off-market hospitality assets and development land in Tanzania and Zanzibar. Enquiries to invest@beachandbush.africa.