Past event summary

Speakers

Peter Welborn
Peter has been Chairman of Knight Frank’s 13 Africa businesses since 2005, where the company employ over 700 people in 10 countries. Having lived and worked in Nigeria for over 10 years, Peter returns there 5 or 6 times a year on specific projects, in addition to working extensively in African countries where Knight Frank does not have offices.

His Africa team has worked in 34 countries in the last 27 months for clients including sovereign governments, global organisations and local affiliates.

Peter jointly heads up the Restructuring and Recoveries team in the UK advising a wide spectrum of both lenders and investors to the UK real estate market.

Peter is a very experienced global property adviser and asset manager with a demonstrable track record of working with large space users and owners of properties, together with their funding institutions.  He is experienced in complex problem solving and project management tasks involving multi‐disciplined inputs in challenging environments and emerging markets.

In the UK, Peter has been personally appointed by a large number of major UK and European lenders to the UK and European property sectors, as a Law of Property Act Receiver, covering a portfolio of well in excess of £3.5bn.

As a Member of the Chartered Securities Institute, Peter has led 8 successful equity raising and debt structuring new property fund projects in addition to both operating and closing those funds.

Ben Woodhams
Ben Woodhams is the Managing Director of Knight Frank Kenya and has over twenty years experience in real estate consultancy.  As Managing Director he is responsible for all the operations in the country, which include valuations, commercial and residential management and agency, project management, feasibility studies and general real estate consultancy work.  The Kenya operation has over 160 staff with over 5m sq. ft commercial space and 500 residential units under its management.  Prior to joining Knight Frank Kenya, Ben was General Manager of the Tanzanian office for four years, with a similar role.

In 1995, he joined Nelson Bakewell in their highly progressive Investment Agency department.  Here he was responsible for the purchasing and disposal of investment property for institutions and other large-scale real estate investors.  During this time he was selected for a secondment with GE Capital to assist with the setting up of their entire real estate portfolio, which they purchased from MEPC.

In 1992, he joined Rogers Chapman and as a Senior Surveyor was responsible for the management of an estate of over 450 commercial properties.

François Conradie
François Conradie is Head of Research at NKC Oxford Economics. He studied a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Stellenbosch, and holds an MPhil in Futures Studies from the same university. After teaching French and English in Cape Town for a year he began his career in marketing. In 2007 he moved to Tunisia where he worked as a stockbroker on the local market, and in 2008 he moved to Morocco to launch the international trading desk for Integra Bourse, a regional financial services company. He returned to South Africa in 2010 and started doing the political analysis for NKC in August 2011. Since becoming Head of Research in 2016, his work has focussed on macroeconomic dynamics in an environment of lower commodity prices.