First came the mobile phones, then the banks and discount retailers. Now, property companies are training their sights on frontier Africa, attracted by growing stability and wealth, a huge population and the world’s fastest rates of urbanisation. The poorest continent is still strewn with pitfalls, not least corruption, woeful infrastructure and haphazard laws that can make securing “clean” title deeds on a plot of land an arduous process.

The wide variety of legal codes found in...