Joint venture housing projects in dar es salaam city: An analysis of challenges and effectiveness

National Housing Corporation (NHC) a public sector in Tanzania, adopted Public Private Partnership (PPP) strategy since 1980s, with the aim of re-developing its plots hosting condemned buildings and those which are no longer in conformity with the best land uses. As an asset management strategy it also aimed to increase its property portfolio and market share. However these Joint Venture (JV) projects encountered a number of challenges causing some projects to fail. In order to address this knowledge gap, this paper aims to identify the failure factors (challenges) and assess the effectiveness of NHC-JV projects. In other words the paper entails to know if the JV projects were beneficial to the corporation and the public at large. The following criteria such as quality of buildings, increase in rental income, tenants' satisfaction and timely completion will be used to measure the success. A mixed method approach was used to collect data. The data were gathered using documentary review, questionnaires and structured interviews whereby both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were employed to questionnaires and content analysis was used for interviews. The sample was purposely selected which included 10 local partners, 20 NHC officials and 20 tenants. The findings of this study, indicates that NHC-JV projects in real estate development were not as effective as planned due to non-adherence to the rules and regulations, bad determination of initial shareholding ratio, weak contracts and inadequate management of the projects. Nevertheless some benefits such as improvement of the quality of buildings and increase in rental income were realized. Hence from the identified challenges, this study recommends a number of solutions such as careful selection of potential partners as well as close monitoring and evaluation of projects in order to make these projects more successful.