The Sunday News
Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Business Reporter
LISTED property concern, Dawn Properties Limited has joined a bandwagon of companies that have shut down operations in Bulawayo after closing its branch in the second capital at the beginning of the year.
Dawn Property consultancy executive-property Mr Brian Kashoni said the decision to close the Bulawayo branch and centralising all its operations was a business resolution aimed at ensuring “savings” and implementing “survival strategies”.
The company closed shop on 1 January.
“It’s a business decision. We have introduced a highly robust integrated management system which enables us to reach out at our clients throughout the country this includes areas such as Beitbridge, Gwanda and Hwange that is on the southern part of the country and of course we have others in Mutare. We service space of 350 000 square metres countrywide.
“We are able to do property management and evaluation while in Harare it’s like operating through Internet. We haven’t shut down operations but we have shrunk our satellite office in Bulawayo into the Harare, we have one of our biggest clients there NSSA (National Social Security Authority). We haven’t ceased serving our customers but we are not having a constant direct interface,” Mr Kashoni said.
He said the newly introduced “integrated management system” was part of the firm’s efforts to conform within the requirements of its International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) certification. The company attained the quality management system, ISO 9001-2008 in 2014 guaranteeing the level of service it offers to the market.
The ISO 9001-2008 quality management system standard’s objective was to achieve perfection by making sure firms improve on customer service delivery, quality and value senses through a systemic framework of internal procedures and work instructions formulated around essential elements and addresses the needs of customers.
Mr Kashoni said the number of employees that were affected by the closure of the branch was not much since most of the workers were employed on temporal contract basis.
“Three quarters of the staff were actually on contract being periodically employed as consultants and seven were permanent and we had a mutual termination agreement with them and we are making arrangements with them with a view to retain them as consultants though some have since found employment elsewhere,” he said.
Estate Agents Council chairman Mr Oswald Nyakunika also acknowledged the closure of Dawn Property
Consultancy’s Bulawayo branch but hinted that it was purely an internal business decision.
“It’s an internal business issue and anyone can do that. Estate Agents can open branches all over and then decide I no longer want some of them because it won’t be viable and then they can always close those ones,” he said.
