Taaleri, a Finnish financial group, is increasing their exposure to East African real estate by continuing their alliance with Cytonn Investments and partnering with East African real estate investment and private equity firm, Fusion Capital. The Helsinki listed group has subsidiaries in wealth and asset management, private equity, insurance as well as other financial services.

In the Meru province of Kenya, Taleeri will work with Fusion Capital on their Greenwood City mixed use project. It will include a ‘state of the art’ mall with spacious shops, a 6 storey Grade A office block as well as apartments featuring 2 and 3 bedroom units.

According to Kenya’s Daily Nation, Taaleri started to take advantage of investment opportunities in the region with their first $50 million fund, but the group is now planning on raising new funds and are looking to double what was initially raised as quickly as Q1:2017.

During their visit to Cytonn Investments, Managing Partner and CEO of Cytonn, Edwin H. Dande explained that their partnership has worked well. So far, Taaleri has delivered over Kshs 3 billion ($29.34m) of funding to Cytonn projects, which are typically residential or mixed-use and located in and around Nairobi, Kenya.

African Real Estate Fund investors are increasingly looking to East or Francophone West Africa as many of the other countries in the region have hit economic tragedy due to the dip in commodity prices. This dip has severely affected Nigeria, Angola, Zambia and Ghana to name a few. However, East African countries such as Kenya, which expanded 6.2% in Q2:2016 (most recent data) have remained resilient as the local tourism sector recovers. This is a sharp contrast with Nigeria, their West African counterpart who contracted -2.24% in Q3:2016 and have been growing negatively since Q1:2016.