Offshoring is now the fastest-growing source of office demand in the country, and it’s not just a Cape Town story. According to BPESA, SA’s business process outsourcing sector went from 65,000 jobs in 2019 to about 150,000 in 2024, targeting 500,000 by 2030, with the UK and US buying most of it.

In 2025, the Eastern Cape logged 1,612 new global business services jobs, up from 251 the year before, a sixfold jump on BPESA's own count. The demand is landing in Gqeberha, East London and Tshwane, and in township-adjacent nodes like Mitchells Plain and Soweto, exactly where office is still priced as if nobody wants it.

The Play:

If you own office in one of those nodes, you may be marketing to the wrong tenant. Re-target the offshoring operators, and know what they need: big contiguous floorplates, enterprise fibre with real redundancy, backup power, public-transport access, and room for a training centre, which appears in nearly every new facility and is a cheap way to stand out. The front doors are public, BPESA nationally and CapeBPO in the Western Cape.

If you own geared commercial property, your loan or your hedge is almost certainly priced off JIBAR. The Reserve Bank has confirmed that JIBAR will be published for the last time on 31 December 2026, with a benchmark called ZARONIA taking over. If your facility runs past that date without proper fallback wording, you have a live contractual problem.

Domestic JIBAR-linked exposure sat at roughly R43 trillion in mid-2025, against ZARONIA take-up of just over R200 billion. Banks stopped writing new JIBAR loans in March, so it's all legacy paper. One practical change: ZARONIA is a backwards-looking overnight rate compounded in arrears, so your interest cost is known after the period, not set at the start.

The Play:

Search every facility document for the word JIBAR: term loans, revolvers, development facilities, and every swap or cap behind them. For each, read the fallback clause: Does it hardwire a switch to ZARONIA plus a credit adjustment spread, or fall back to something vague or lender-determined? Vague is where the disputes and bad pricing live. Where it's weak, amend now rather than in December, because your bargaining power drops as the queue lengthens.

Cape Town has already run. KwaZulu-Natal hasn't, and the money going in now says it's next. This isn't speculative capital: Industrial land, bulk services and export manufacturing are arriving together. Dube TradePort, the special economic zone around King Shaka airport, has pulled R4.2 billion of private investment and sustains about 36,872 jobs across the province, with another R480 million last year, and KZN is running a R22 billion SEZ pipeline across King Shaka and Richards Bay.

What matters is what's available. TradeZone 2 has opened 45 hectares as 23 fully serviced sites, from 3,000m² to 57,000m², already connected to power and bulk. Serviced, connected industrial land inside an SEZ is the scarce item in this country. And the operators are voting: Radisson chose KZN over the Western Cape because it's cheaper and underbuilt, the same logic that made Cape Town expensive a decade ago.

The Play:

Look at industrial and logistics land in the King Shaka corridor and around TradeZone 2, Umhlanga and the north coast for mixed-use, Richards Bay for the export end. If you already hold KZN land or older industrial stock near that corridor, get it revalued before you think about selling, because you may be holding the appreciating asset without knowing it. Worth pricing in: qualifying SEZ tenants get tax and customs advantages, which strengthens your covenant, not just your land value.

SA's biggest office tenant needs to stop renting. Government pays roughly R6 billion a year leasing private office space while sitting on thousands of vacant buildings of its own, and it's setting up a state property company to fix exactly that.

The Cape Town port is fixing itself before fruit season. Ship turnaround has come down from 103 hours to 55, with container volumes up 16% this quarter, and all 28 new cranes are running. The port moves about 80% of SA's deciduous fruit. Note what's on the readiness list: reefer plug points and cold-chain capacity for cargo waiting at the terminal. Wind is still the binding risk, so buffer storage nearby keeps its value.

Small industrial space is where the demand actually is. Inospace signed 67 leases covering 22,265m² in July, its best month ever in Johannesburg and 27% above its previous record, in a month that school holidays normally flatten. The demand is coming from SMEs and e-commerce wanting small, flexible units.

The Expropriation Act is in court, and the government admits it's flawed. A full bench of the Western Cape High Court heard five days of argument from the DA, AfriForum and the IRR that the Act is unconstitutional. Notably, the Presidency and the National Council of Provinces conceded a drafting error in the section covering compensation disputes.

A mining group runs five large sites with long perimeters and was already spending heavily to monitor them: Over 1,600 drone hours a month, 35,000km of vehicle patrols, and cameras along the fences. All of which couldn’t see one another or communicate, so no one really knew which route was most effective.

Once all three systems were brought into one dashboard, decisions became easy: Patrol routes could be set against where incidents actually clustered. Over 100 suspects were detected and more than 15 arrested.

They didn't buy more patrols or tools. They simply made everything smarter.

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