Why property is so expensive in Zimbabwe?

Zawya

5 days ago

That's what happened when I stumbled across a piece online titled 'Why Are Properties So Pricey in Zimbabwe? Here Are 8 Reasons' published on 9 June, 2025, by NewZWire.
It was informative, well-structured, and made a compelling case around factors like land shortages, inflation, and the collapse of the mortgage market. I read it twice. Then I sat with it.
Yet something nagged at me long after I'd put my phone down. It wasn't what the article said, but what it didn't say. The formal explanations were sound, but incomplete. They described the visible surface of the problem but left the deeper, murkier waters untouched. They skirted around a critical but uncomfortable reality: that part of the reason Zimbabwe's real estate is absurdly expensive is not just scarcity, inflation, or investment demand: but the sheer volume of illegal money flowing through the system like a river whose source we're too afraid to trace.
So I began to write. Because if we are to make sense of this wild, unregulated property market where USD 1,2 million homes are purchased in cash with no financing trail, we must first be willing to acknowledge that it is also a playground for laundered wealth. Not all buyers are diaspora dreamers. Some are opportunists. Others are ghosts.
There's something surreal about Zimbabwe's real estate market. You could drive through the potholed streets of Harare, where traffic lights blink aimlessly and garbage skips are overgrown with weeds, and then take a sharp turn into a plush gated community with manicured lawns and towering perimeter walls, and suddenly you're standing in front of a five-bedroom mansion worth US$1.8 million. No mortgage signs. No realtors explaining financing options. Just a crisp 'FOR SALE' board,or sometimes not even that, because the house is not actually for sale. It's just parked wealth. In cash.
When you look at this landscape with a critical lens, it becomes clear that part of the reason Zimbabwe's property prices are so obscenely high has little to do with supply and demand in the traditional economic sense. Yes, there is urbanisation. Yes, there are housing shortages. Yes, construction materials are costly and the mortgage market is barely functional. But those are only part of the story. The rest; perhaps the most important and least discussed part is what you don't see. The quiet torrents of illegal money that are flooding into the property market, washing away any hope for average Zimbabweans to own a decent home. And no one is asking questions.
One week, someone arrives in the country with a foreign passport and no paperwork. The next, they are buying multiple properties, often in cash. No bank flags the transaction. No agency asks the source of funds. No anti-money laundering protocols are triggered. In a country where a security guard earns US$150 a month, someone can roll into Harare with a duffle bag of dollars and buy a cluster of townhouses outright.
This is structural. It is systemic. And it is being quietly tolerated because too many powerful people are either complicit or benefiting. The effect is clear: Zimbabwe's property market has become a laundromat for illicit finance. The houses are the washing machines. And the state? It's the blindfolded custodian who doesn't want to know why the power bill is so high.
There is an entire shadow economy operating behind the bricks and tiles. Smugglers, cartels, gold barons, human traffickers, fuel syndicates, and politically connected elites have discovered that the best place to clean dirty money is not some distant Caribbean island. It is right here on our soil, in our streets, under our noses. A house in Borrowdale becomes not just a home, but a vault. Property in Zimbabwe, especially in Harare's northern suburbs, has ceased to be about housing. It is now a financial instrument: a store of untouchable value in a fragile economy where the official currency is a fiction and formal banking systems are distrusted.
This trend mirrors what scholars and financial crime watchdogs have observed globally. In his investigations into illicit financial flows, Raymond Baker, author of Capitalism's Achilles Heel, points out that real estate is often the final resting place for dirty money. Once parked in bricks and mortar, funds become nearly impossible to trace. In countries with weak financial oversight or political complicity, real estate becomes the destination of choice for money that must be hidden in plain sight. Zimbabwe is no different; except that our crisis is more visible because our economy is so small, and the disparities so grotesque.
A 2023 study by Global Financial Integrity (GFI) found that real estate and luxury asset purchases were among the top means for laundering illicit gains in developing countries. The report noted that in nations with poor land registry systems, compromised public institutions, and limited regulatory enforcement, property markets tend to attract abnormal levels of cash-only transactions from unknown sources. Sound familiar?
What's deeply alarming is the ease with which these transactions happen. In other countries, even in places not exactly known for spotless governance, a purchase of over $10,000 in cash raises red flags. Financial institutions are legally obligated to file Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs). There are know-your-customer (KYC) protocols. Auditors are interested. But in Zimbabwe? Ask anyone in the property business. A buyer can show up with stacks of crisp U.S. dollars, buy a house outright, and walk away with title deeds in hand. No one; not the agent, not the conveyancer, not the Registrar of Deeds, asks about the origin of the money. And if you're politically connected? The process becomes even smoother.
Some lawyers have become conveyor belts for these transactions. Shell companies are created, title deeds are moved around, and before long, the trail is buried under layers of legal obfuscation. A few of these lawyers are openly advertising 'discreet transaction services.' They know the game. And the game has rigged the market.
What's the result? Market distortion. Properties are not being priced according to construction costs or supply and demand. They're being priced according to how much money someone needs to 'clean.' A house that would cost US$200,000 to build is listed at US$310,000 not because the market demands it, but because the buyer needs to cycle that much money into the formal system without raising suspicion. This artificially inflates prices across the board, meaning that even legitimate buyers now have to compete in a rigged, distorted, overvalued market.
This distortion creates knock-on effects. Land developers raise prices because everyone is benchmarking against these abnormal sales. Rental markets become unlivable for the working class. Young professionals earning honest salaries in USD are priced out. A generation is being denied the right to property ownership not because they're lazy or irresponsible, but because they're trying to earn clean money in a dirty game.
Even diaspora buyers, once hailed as saviours of the real estate sector, are now losing interest. One buyer based in the UK, who returned to Harare hoping to invest in a modest home, described the market as 'insane.' He walked away from a deal after learning that his seller had acquired the property just six months earlier for half the asking price and was likely involved in smuggling. 'It's not just a financial risk anymore,' he said. 'It's a moral and legal one too.'
This is the paradox of Zimbabwe's housing market: there is both a crisis of affordability and a glut of high-end property. Go to Borrowdale, Glen Lorne, or parts of Greystone Park, and you'll find dozens of empty mansions. Lights off. Curtains drawn. No residents. These are not homes. They are safehouses for money. Meanwhile, the housing backlog sits at 1.5 million and counting. It is a grotesque reflection of our priorities.
But let's be clear: this is not just about greedy individuals. It is a policy failure. A governance failure. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) has repeatedly warned about illicit financial flows, and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) has the legal mandate to investigate such transactions. But where is the enforcement? Who is asking for source-of-funds declarations in these million-dollar deals? Who is probing politically exposed persons whose known salaries could never explain their portfolios?
The answer, tragically, is almost no one. Because the rot is protected. The money is too powerful. And the truth is too inconvenient.
Until we acknowledge the toxic role of illicit finance in our property market, any talk of affordability will be hollow. We can't fix housing by building more units alone, not when those units become new vehicles for washing money. We can't regulate prices without regulating where the money comes from. And we can't restore fairness unless we start with accountability.
Other countries have begun to confront these problems head-on. In Canada, laws have been introduced to ban blind real estate trusts and require public disclosure of beneficial property ownership. In the UK, unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) empower law enforcement to seize assets that cannot be justified by legitimate income. These are not perfect systems, but they are signals that states are taking illicit finance seriously. Zimbabwe must begin its own reckoning. We must stop pretending that what we are seeing is normal market behaviour. It is not.
The irony is bitter. In a country still rebuilding from the ashes of hyperinflation, still haunted by economic trauma, the greatest threat to housing is not foreign sanctions or material costs. It is internal complicity. It is the decision to look the other way while mansions sprout from illicit wealth. And it is the silence of institutions that were built to protect public trust.
Until we stop laundering lies through brick and mortar, Zimbabweans will continue to live in shadows cast by the walls of mansions they cannot afford, built with money that should never have existed in the first place.
And for that, the price is far higher than even US$1.8 million can explain.
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