A liquidator (a court-appointed seller for a failed company) is auctioning two rental estates owned by Capital City Housing, a social housing company. Acacia Park in Pelham has 311 flats listed at R155 million, about R498,000 a flat (our arithmetic). Signal Hill has 393 flats, price on application. Each sells with its tenants on 27 October at the Redlands Hotel in Pietermaritzburg.

Bidders choose: keep the flats as social housing, or bid free of those rules if the restrictions can be lifted.

Acacia Park's rent roll (the list of tenants and what they pay) bills R990,211 a month, about R11.9 million a year. The average rent is R3,511. Every lease is month-to-month, and 70% of tenants owe some rent.

A third estate, Aloe Ridge, with 952 flats, goes to online auction from 6 to 9 November. About 260 of its flats have been illegally occupied since 2018.

The Play:

Build one line per flat from the rent roll: rent, arrears, months owed and lease start date. Subtract rates, maintenance, management and bad debt to get net rent. Decide the return you need, and that sets your walk-away bid. Flag oddities, like 22 flats paying exactly R2,970.80 from one start date, and ask the auctioneer on 033 397 1190.

Waterfall Equestrian Estate, next to Waterfall City and Mall of Africa, has 120 stands of 8,000m² to 10,000m². Residents share stables for 63 horses, a polo field, jumping arenas, 10 paddocks and 12km of trails along the Jukskei River.

Homes are marketed from about R20 million to R150 million and rent for R80,000 to R150,000 a month. Two on the market now are listed at R45 million and R38 million. A vacant 1.4ha stand is listed at R17 million, about R1,200 a square metre (our arithmetic).

The estate began as farmland, with the first 66 stands released in 2006 and 2007. Homes sit on 99-year leases rather than freehold, and buyers pay no transfer duty. All of these are asking prices, not sales.

The Play:

Pick the business hubs growing fastest near you. List every agricultural holding within a 15-minute drive, one line each: size, zoning, water and asking price per hectare. Beside each, add what estate stands nearby; list it per square metre. Update it every quarter. The farms with the biggest gap, near a hub that keeps growing, are where the next estate will be built.

On 12 October, Inospace bought an N1-facing building in Midrand out of business rescue (a court-supervised attempt to save a struggling company, which often means selling property). It has 5,242m² of lettable space on a 15,197m² stand, is almost fully let, and takes Inospace to about 50,000m² in Midrand. The price wasn't disclosed.

It’s the fifth Johannesburg park Inospace has bought this quarter. CEO Rael Levitt says business-rescue sales let buyers with cash reach buildings that rarely come to market at today's prices.

Inospace splits buildings into small units on flexible terms for more than 2,100 small-business tenants. Levitt says firms are swapping big premises on long leases for space they can scale up or down, as they did during Covid, its strongest growth period.

The Play:

Keep one list of every business-rescue property sale on the main auction sites, and add new ones weekly. For each: size, location, tenants, rent and arrears from the person running the sale. Beside it, track asking rents per square metre for small units in that area. Bid on the buildings that would earn more split into small units than let as one.

Equites is leaving the UK for SA warehouses. The JSE-listed landlord sold five UK warehouses for £200.5 million (R4.39bn) and has three UK properties left, due to go by 2028. The cash goes into seven SA developments worth R2.4 billion, at yields on cost of 8% to 9%. Its SA leases rise by 6.1% a year on average.

Boxer has doubled its stores since 2020. The discount grocer has gone from 298 stores to 608 and plans 60 more this financial year, on R1.1 billion of capital spending. Its CEO says rents rise 5% to 6% a year, as do wages and electricity, so every new store has to earn its place.

The world's biggest platinum mine may go underground. Valterra Platinum plans trial underground mining at Mogalakwena, near Mokopane in Limpopo, later this year, with a final investment decision in 2027. The mine already has more than eight decades of reserves. That is decades of demand for housing and services in Mokopane.

Wimpy and Mugg & Bean are out at Kruger. SANParks has appointed new restaurant operators at four camps after the old concessions expired. Lower Sabie's Mugg & Bean becomes Sabie River Café, and Pretoriuskop's Wimpy becomes Le Lapeng Burgers and Grill. No contract values were published. State concessions do come back to market.

Growthpoint wants to sign a lease in a day. The JSE-listed landlord launches SmartLease in November, a digital process from first enquiry to signed lease. A commercial lease usually takes weeks of back-and-forth between tenant, broker and manager. Every week saved is a week of rent.

A large Johannesburg inner-city landlord runs more than 50 residential and mixed-use buildings. Its electricity bill topped R6.5 million a month, and it only saw what had gone wrong weeks later, on the invoice.

Smart meters on every building now feed one live view of 24 million kWh a year. The system flags abnormal use and the buildings driving peak demand as it happens. It also models what solar or a new tariff would save before any money is spent.

If you own rental flats, your power bill already shows which building is wasting money. Most owners just see it too late.

Built. A newsletter by The Awareness Company.