01
Operating businesses
Hands-on in the businesses doing the work, where better operations and procurement show up directly in the margin and in the building.
The Hourami Group is the professional platform through which Botan Hourami undertakes property advisory, asset improvement and commercial projects. Work is delivered directly, through operating businesses or with selected specialist partners.
Building value in property and business, one problem at a time.
25 years of building, buying, running and occasionally closing businesses, now applied to property and commercial problems that have defeated someone else. Delivered directly or with specialist partners, with one person answerable throughout.
I don’t believe in reacting quickly. I believe in understanding properly.
The thesis
Not every problem needs more money spent on it.
Quite often it needs a different approach. Across property, facilities management, retail, hospitality and services, the same pattern has held: value is unlocked by operational improvement, disciplined procurement, persistence and commercial thinking, not by spending alone.
The Hourami Group exists to apply that thinking consistently: to the buildings it works on, to the businesses it works alongside, and over time to the opportunities it takes on directly.
What we do
Six areas, and nothing outside them.
- Property and asset advisory
- Facilities management oversight
- Procurement and service charge reviews
- Difficult refurbishments and project recovery
- Commercial property and operator sourcing
- Support for investors, managing agents and family offices
By the numbers
25
Years in business, 20 of them in property
Multiple
Businesses founded, acquired or operated
£1m
Rent recovered in the first week of one assignment
30–40%
Service charge savings, where retendering applied
Figures describe work carried out over the period, some of it through the businesses named on this site.
How we create value
Three ways the Group works.
02
Property opportunities
Buildings where the problem is operational rather than financial — the ones that need investigation and persistence more than capital.
03
Partnerships
Operators and entrepreneurs who work the same way. A direction of travel, not an established programme.
Thinking
The problem nobody could solve
What changed my thinking was how ordinary the method turned out to be. Everyone before me had given up — not because the fault could not be found, but because finding it meant tracing every cable and every pipe in the flat, and that is slow, boring work with no guarantee at the end of it. I did exactly that, and everything led to the same wall. So I knocked it down.
Five-year direction
Where this is going.
A direction of travel for the businesses, projects and partnerships Botan intends to build over time. The Hourami Group is also the framework for what he intends to build next.
Direction, not forecast. Some of it formalises work already being done.
Now
Consolidate the operating base
Strengthen delivery, systems and standards across the businesses already trading.
Now
Procurement and retendering, sold properly
Reviewing contracts, renegotiating supplier terms and running tender exercises is already the most effective tool the Group has for a client. The intention is to offer it as a service in its own right rather than as a method buried inside a maintenance contract.
Next
Lettings and operator sourcing
Filling commercial space by approaching operators directly, in the situations where conventional agency has stalled. The Group has done this on long-vacant premises; the direction is to take it on as a defined mandate.
Next
Development on our own account
Moving from supporting other people’s schemes to running smaller residential and mixed-use projects directly: conversions, refurbishment and permitted development, at a scale where operational thinking matters more than capital.
A note from the founder
I started my first business at 16 and I have been solving other people’s problems ever since. What I have learned is that most things people call impossible are just things nobody has looked at properly yet. That is the whole idea behind the Hourami Group: look properly, act commercially, and build something that lasts longer than I do.
Have something worth solving?
A direct route for partnerships, opportunities, introductions and general enquiries. Enquiries are read by Botan and answered personally.