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Investing and harnessing the best out of a company’s human capital is an important thing for every business. 

At face value, South Africa’s listed property sector appears to have lost some of its lustre in recent months.

One of Africa’s leading property services firm, Broll Property Group scooped eight awards in the Euromoney Real Estate Awards 2015.

With an increased focus on Africa from multinational occupiers, the key trends of portfolio optimisation, flexibility and improved utilisation form part of a specialised real estate service for corporates.

Attacq‚ previously Atterbury Investment Holdings‚ has raised R512m in a "heavily oversubscribed" private placement and has closed its book build‚ the company said on Wednesday.

Economic shift to information age necessitates a review of corporate real estate strategy, positioning and perhaps a debate on the buy/let decision by companies.

Property as an investment asset provides owners with numerous financing options such as mortgage bond, sale and leaseback transactions and getting an equity investor. It does however require huge down payments and cash outflows in the process, which represents an opportunity cost of capital. The cash could be used for furtherance of the business objective.

There is a need for real estate to remain flexible to complement business strategies. Owning may potentially lock an owner long term even where mismatches between property and business objectives arise. Letting does provide companies with some degree of flexibility on lease durations and avoids complexities of financing a property.

Leases however are engineered for profit by the lessor and can be expensive in the long run.

The primary mission of directors is to utilise scarce capital to increase shareholder value and perhaps no one solution exists to corporate real estate with each having pros and cons? Perhaps the type of entity and stage in the life cycle of the business determine what strategy would suit the business?

December marked a slight recovery in the Global Real Estate Sector; all regions except for Australia were up for the month, with North America having a particularly strong month gaining 16.2%. There were also some good gains across Europe and Asia

Vukile Property Fund Limited listed on the Financial - Real Estate sector of the JSE Stock Exchange on Thursday, after completing the privateplacement of 13,800,000 linked units at an issue price of 5.00 rand each.

Provest Management listed its first unit trust, the Provest Property Equity Fund, on Tuesday 1 June.

Savings of almost R4 million have been made by Mutual and Federal Insurance Company through a sub-let of a Windhoek building left empty after the companyis acquisition of FGI Namibia.