Brett Abrahamse was 28 when he started a property company and pointed it at Zimbabwe, a country most international money had spent two decades avoiding. Fifteen years later his firm has persuaded Hilton to open its first hotel there.
The agreement was announced in late August at ZimReal, Zimbabwe's property investment forum. Hilton is putting its Garden Inn brand on a 140-room hotel in Harare's Highlands district, one of the city's established residential and diplomatic neighbourhoods, roughly 20 to 25km from Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport. It is due to open in early 2029. Neither side would say what the agreement is worth or how the hotel will be paid for.
The developer who listed Zimbabwe's first property trust
Terrace Africa is doing the building, and it has a record in the country to point at. Since 2011 it has delivered more than US$230 million of projects across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and South Africa, and it runs on 21 people out of offices in Harare and Johannesburg. In 2022 it listed the Tigere Property Fund on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, the country's first exchange-traded property trust, which gave local pension funds something they could trade instead of buildings they had to own outright. Developing there also means doing work a municipality would do elsewhere. The company is widening a kilometre of Emmerson Mnangagwa Road to carry the traffic its own shopping centre generates.
Harare's missing beds
The hotel arrives into a shortage. Industry estimates put the capital's stock of three- to five-star beds at fewer than 11,000 against a requirement of around 20,000, and this is the first significant hotel development Harare has seen in years. Hilton points to the more than 1.7 million international arrivals Zimbabwe recorded last year, and to Harare's role as a commercial and diplomatic gateway for the region.
For the hotel group this is one more pin in a map it has been filling in fast. Hilton signed a record 29 deals across 15 countries in 2025, and now has more than 70 hotels trading in Africa with over 100 in the pipeline, more than half of those in sub-Saharan Africa. Zimbabwe is the newest name on the list, and the sign goes up three years from now.
