Lesedi Kgaka, a PhD Land Economy candidate supervised by Professor Thies Lindenthal and Associate Professor François Viruly, is currently researching topics in REITs, risk, return, corporate real estate, finance, investment, sustainability, and energy. She has been awarded a Business Science in Finance and Accounting and a Master of Science in Real Estate degrees from the University of Cape Town. Lesedi is a qualified Chartered Surveyor awarded by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors as well as an Allan Gray Fellow. She is based at Trinity Hall and is the Founder of the Trinity Hall Wine Society, Lesedi is a Master Practitioner in Real Estate with the Estate Agency Affairs Board in South Africa and served as a non-executive director as the Chairperson of the Investment Committee of RH12J (an RH Bophelo company). She has over ten years of real estate experience in sales, rentals, management and investment. Lesedi has served as a researcher at the Urban Real Estate Research Unit, a Tutor for Urban Real Estate Economics, a Postgraduate Supervisor and a Land Economist at the University of Cape Town. She currently supervised the Master’s in Real Estate in Finance Program at the University of Cambridge.

Lesedi Kgaka is an entrepreneur and an academic, having founded a real estate brokerage firm and a PropTech company which raised VC funding. Additionally,  she is the Managing Editor of the Journal of African Real Estate Research based at the University of Cape Town. Ms Kgaka brings diversity to the University of Cambridge as her research topic focused on the Uncertainty of Real Estate Investment Returns using rare data from developing economies, such as South Africa. Following her PhD, Lesedi aims to enter the Real Estate Private Equity and Finance industries.

Past

Urban Land Economics (University of Cape Town) (2021-2022) – Tutor

Current

MPhil REF: Corporate Finance and Real Estate (University of Cambridge ) 2023 – current – Teaching Associate

REITs, risk, return, corporate real estate, finance, investment, sustainability, energy

REITs, risk, return, corporate real estate, finance, investment, sustainability, energy

Cambridge Real Estate Research Centre, Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy