Did Highland Park take its neighbours' shoppers?
Highland Park opened in June 2022 a few minutes from Chisipite, Kamfinsa, Newlands and Ballantyne Park. Did it take their shoppers, and if so whose?
7 November 2026 · Real estate, Retail · Read the article on dotzedw.com · City map
Harare's property market says Highland Park took trade from the older centres around it. Nobody publishes footfall or turnover for them, so we tested the claim with what can be measured from outside.
We modelled which centre is nearest by road for every home in the area, with and without Highland Park, for fourteen centres; and we read the satellite record of eleven car parks since 2017 before and after it opened, against benchmark centres beyond its reach. This page holds the full results, centre by centre.
What members get
- For whom Highland Park became the nearest centre, by the centre that was nearest before, with a sensitivity test
- People within 10 minutes of each of fourteen centres, how much of Highland Park's catchment each shares, and roof area per resident
- Saturday and Sunday car-park activity at eleven centres before and after June 2022, with the pooled test against benchmarks
- The catchment map and a download of every centre's figures
This study is part of the Individual plan
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How we did it
Drive times come from the dotzedw city model: OpenStreetMap roads with free-flow speeds by road class, so they are off-peak times, and 15 km/h from each home to the nearest junction.
Population is WorldPop's 2024 constrained map at 100 m, which matches ZIMSTAT's 2022 census counts by ward in Harare (our test).
Centres: every named centre with a mapped supermarket within about 5 km of Highland Park (OpenStreetMap and Overture), plus Sam Levy's Village and Glen Lorne at the edge. The small Lewisam shops (a supermarket and a fuel station) are left out of the main comparison and tested as a sensitivity.
Roof area per resident uses Google Open Buildings v3, leaving out mapped business and industrial land and buildings over 1,500 m².
Car parks: the open paved ground inside each centre's outline from OpenStreetMap (or 160 m around its point), less roofs, public roads and anything green; its brightness on every Sentinel-2 image with at least 80% of it clear, January 2017 to October 2026 (from Element 84's Earth Search), modelled with the season, the year and terms for weekdays, month-ends, holidays and lockdowns in a robust regression, separately before (to June 2022) and after (from July 2022) Highland Park opened. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2017 to 2026.
Highland Park's tenants, floor area and valuation are as reported in the Tigere REIT 2024 annual report.
What this cannot tell you
- Nearest is not chosen: the catchment model shows the pull of location, not market share.
- Drive times assume free-flowing roads; at peak hours real catchments are smaller.
- The satellite sees about 10:15 on clear days: not evenings, not the rainy season, not people on foot or in kombis, and not one centre's crowds against another's.
- A loss smaller than about a point of Saturday lift would not show in 10 m images.
- Chisipite's closure for rebuilding (reported in 2024) is left out of its 'after' period; its reopening date is not confirmed.