By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 03
A 14,500 square metre centre on a site no formal developer had touched – the Goreangab build is a template for the underserved node.
The Goreangab Mall that opened on 6 June 2026 is easy to read as a retail story. As a property story it is more instructive: N$270 million (about US$15 million) of concrete, steel and lettable space placed on a site in greater Katutura that formal developers had long passed over. Oryx Properties and Safland Property Group treated that underserved area as a location, not a liability.
The decision to build 14,500 square metres of retail where the market was informal and untested is the real property bet. Everything about the structure – its parking, its transport deck, its green rating – is an answer to the question of how to make a formal asset work in a place the sector had written off.
The site that no one had formalised
Greater Katutura and Goreangab hold tens of thousands of residents whose retail spending had no formal home nearby, sending shoppers to malls across town. For a property developer that gap reads two ways: as thin infrastructure and unproven demand, or as a catchment with nowhere local to spend. Oryx and Safland priced it as the second.
The mall sits within a larger Goreangab Waterfront scheme that also carries 2,500 residential units under construction, which changes the property arithmetic. A centre anchored to thousands of new homes is underwriting its own future footfall rather than betting on a fixed catchment that might never grow.
The bet was not on a building but on a location the sector had ignored.
What N$270 million actually bought
The physical asset is substantial for its setting. Around 14,500 square metres of retail sits above roughly 10,000 square metres of basement parking and taxi ranks, giving the centre an integrated public-transport deck with direct taxi access below the shops. In a settlement where many shoppers arrive by minibus, that deck is not a convenience but the front door.
The build consumed about 7,600 cubic metres of concrete and 490 tonnes of reinforcing steel, with a quarter of a million labour hours logged during construction. Those are the unglamorous numbers behind a formal centre, and they explain why such assets rarely reach areas that cannot promise the rents to repay them.
The transport deck, not the shopfronts, is what makes the asset fit its market.
Building green, and building on time
The centre was designed to an Edge green-building certification, the efficiency standard that trims running costs on water and power – a material concern for a mall that has to keep occupancy affordable in a low-income catchment. In an asset meant to last decades, lower operating cost is what protects the rent.
Delivery held up under strain. Main contractor Andeo Construction, on site from early 2025, reported concrete work about 95 per cent complete by September and the programme only seven to eight working days behind despite 400 millimetres of rain in a single month. For a difficult urban edge, that is a disciplined build.
A green rating and a kept schedule are how the asset earns its long life.
The template the sector will copy
For the property industry the significance is repeatability. Goreangab shows that a mid-sized, transport-anchored, green-rated centre can be financed and built for an underserved settlement and opened close to schedule. That is a template other developers can carry to the next Katutura, Havana or Babylon.
The risk sits on the other side of opening day. A centre built for a low-income catchment has to hold occupancy and rents through thin years, and the property question shifts from whether it could be built to whether it can be sustained.
The build is proven; the tenancy is the part still to be tested.
For a developer, landlord or property investor, Goreangab is a worked example of formal retail reaching a market the sector had avoided, at a defined cost and on a serviced, transport-linked site. The decision it puts forward is whether to treat Namibia’s underserved settlements as the next pipeline of buildable nodes, or to wait for someone else to prove the rents first.
Sources: The Namibian; Goreangab Mall takes shape (Windhoek Express); Goreangab Mall to be completed in April 2026 (Windhoek Observer)
