From 1 July, you can pocket about R56,000 a year on a 50-unit block, just from the way Ekurhuleni now charges for electricity. Here's the move: instead of letting each tenant buy power straight from the metro, you take one bulk connection for the whole block and resell to your units. The metro sets your bulk price and caps what you may charge each tenant — and the gap is yours.

The money sits in the fixed monthly charge. You pay one basic charge of about R1,352 on the bulk connection, but you may recover about R119 from each unit. Across 50 units, that's roughly R56,000 a year before you've sold a single kilowatt. (The markup on the power itself is tiny, about half a cent a unit, so the fixed-charge spread is the prize.)

The Play:

Check whether your block's bulk connection qualifies, then run the spread on your real unit count: the one basic charge you pay, against the capped charge you may recover per unit. Set your resale pricing before 1 July, at or below what tenants would pay the metro directly, so it's a win for them too. One hard rule: never charge above the cap, the penalty is about R22,000 a month and it wipes out the gain. To get it right, you need every unit's meter and tariff lined up against your bulk bill in one place.

If you own commercial property in Cape Town, your rates bill is about to rise from 1 July, and unlike homeowners, you get nothing to soften it. The city has re-valued every property, and homeowners caught a break (a small rate cut, the first R620,000 of value made rates-free). Commercial owners just get the new, higher value taxed at the full rate.

Here's the bite. A commercial building re-valued from R10 million to R15 million goes from about R169,000 a year in rates to about R254,000, an extra R84,500 a year, with no relief clause. And you're taxed at about 1.69 cents per rand of value against a home's 0.70, roughly 2.4 times the rate, now on a fresh, higher number.

The Play:

Pull the new 2025 valuation for every Cape Town commercial property you own and check it against what the building would actually sell for. If the city has over-valued it, you're paying rates on money that isn't there, and that's worth challenging (check whether the objection window is still open, or whether it's now a formal appeal).

Vukile just told investors its dividend will grow 9.3% this year and 10 to 12% next — strong numbers in a year when loans have stayed expensive and the Reserve Bank is holding rates at 7%. That’s a confident bet, and it only works if they know the rent underneath is full and rising.

What this means is the income side of property is actually still healthy right now. If the big landlords are this sure their rent will keep climbing, it says tenants are paying, space is filling, and inflation is being passed through.

The Play:

Don't read too much into one company. Watch the next payout guidance from the other big landlords (Growthpoint, Redefine, Spear) as their results land. If they all promise growth while rates are high, that's the whole sector telling you rental income is strong and climbing, a green light to hold, raise rents at renewal, or buy.

Fuel is about to drop, even though the tax is going up. The last of the fuel-levy holiday ends on 1 July, adding R1.50 a litre to petrol and R1.96 to diesel. But oil has collapsed to around $78 a barrel since the ceasefire, enough to swallow the tax and still cut the pump price: about R1.40 off petrol and up to R3.01 off diesel.

Morocco just knocked SA off the top of Africa's industrial table. For the first time since 2010, Morocco has overtaken South Africa as the continent's most industrialised economy (AfDB index, 0.8415 to 0.8396). The reason should sting: Morocco built a million cars last year, next to working ports and power, while SA's factories fought stifling regulations and broken rail.

One of SA's biggest carmakers is in deep trouble abroad. Volkswagen is weighing the biggest restructuring in car industry history, up to four German plants closed and 100,000 jobs cut, as Chinese rivals bite. VW is one of SA's largest vehicle makers, and Chinese brands now hold nearly 17% of the local market.

A new power market is coming, and you can shape it till 27 July. NERSA has opened comments on draft rules for a competitive electricity market, where buyers and sellers deal directly instead of through Eskom. This is the stage where the rules that set what you'll pay and who you can buy from are still up for grabs. Make your voice heard.

Seriti Resources runs five large mines, and each one was already watched: drones in the air, patrol vehicles on the ground, cameras on the fences. The problem was that none of them talked to each other. So criminality thrived in the seams between the systems.

Pulling every drone, vehicle and camera onto one screen closed those seams. Now the patrols, the aerial footage and the camera alerts all show up in the same place, in real time, across all five sites at once, more than 1,600 drone hours and 35,000km of patrol coverage a month, all visible together.

The result? Over 100 suspects spotted and more than 15 arrested, as crime took a marked downturn.

Catching them was never about buying more cameras. It was about making the ones they already had see together.

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