Refurbished or extended a building since April 2007? Section 13quin gives you 5% of the cost every year for twenty years, off your taxable income. Spend R20 million on an extension and R1 million a year comes off your tax bill for 20 years. Most owners never claim it.

The part everyone misses: it’s not only whole new buildings. A new and unused improvement to an old building counts too. Residential letting has its own version, section 13sex, at the same rate.

Two traps. SARS treats construction as starting the day the foundation is laid, not the day you cleared the site, and that is what it tests on audit. If you bought rather than built, only 55% of the price counts, because SARS strips out the land. And on sale, SARS recoups what you claimed.

The Play:

Build one row per building and improvement since 1 April 2007: what was done, what it cost, the foundation date, whether it was new and unused, whether you built or bought. Most of that lives in old contracts and invoices, not your accounts, which is why it goes unclaimed. The foundation date decides it, and nobody wrote it down. Take the sheet to your tax practitioner. But remember, this is not tax advice.

Accelerate has agreed to sell Cedar Square in Fourways to a private buyer for R630 million. The buyer gets the centre, its tenants and about R55 million a year of net income. What it does not get is the right to build.

The right to develop roughly 40,000 m² of unused bulk stays with Accelerate, locked in place by a notarial deed of servitude registered against the title, and Accelerate puts its value at about R169 million. On our arithmetic, that is 27% of the price, sitting in something most buyers never think to ask about. If the new owner wants to expand, it has to buy those rights back from the seller.

One detail keeps it fair: the rights are not held forever. Anything still unused ten years after transfer passes to the buyer automatically, for nothing. The deal still needs shareholder and competition approval, though.

The Play:

For every property you own or are buying, pull three things onto one line: the servitude entries on the title deed, the permitted bulk on the zoning certificate, and the floor area actually built. The gap between permitted and built is your unused bulk. The servitude column tells you whether you still own it. Almost nobody puts those three next to each other, which is how R169 million walks out of a deal unnoticed. Do it on your own portfolio first, because you may be sitting on bulk you have never valued.

Three shopping centres have moved from listed funds to private buyers in seven months, and the prices tell you what this stock actually clears at.

Cedar Square in Fourways went to a private group for R630 million across about 44,249 m², which works out to roughly R14,200 a square metre, though that buyer did not get the development rights. Killarney Mall in Johannesburg sold for R397.5 million across 47,470 m² of retail and office, about R8,400 a square metre, and it went R10.1 million below Octodec's own book value. Randridge Mall in Randpark Ridge went from Emira to a buyer that owned exactly one community centre, at an undisclosed price.

The pattern is the point. In every deal, a listed fund sells and a private trust or family group buys. These are balance-sheet decisions, not distress, which means good let centres keep coming to market.

The Play:

Those per-square-metre figures are ours, price divided by floor area, so treat them as a floor and a ceiling rather than a valuation. Then watch the pipeline where it is published first: listed funds announce disposals on SENS long before an agent lists them. Build a standing sheet of the disposals announced by Accelerate, Octodec, Emira, Delta and Growthpoint, with the asset, the floor area, the price where disclosed and the date. Divide price by area each time. Within a few months you will have a live pricing table for exactly the stock you are trying to buy, built from what the market actually paid.

A tycoon just bought the mall in Upington. New Africa Developments has completed its purchase of Kalahari Mall, its first Northern Cape asset, after the Competition Tribunal cleared it unconditionally. Price undisclosed. The centre pulls shoppers from Upington, the towns around it and across the Namibian border. Private money keeps buying dominant regional centres the listed funds never wanted.

Pepkor freed up R2.25 billion without selling a shop. The retailer has sold and leased back three distribution centres, releasing R2.25 billion to redeploy into the group. It keeps operating out of the same buildings; it just no longer owns them. If your capital is locked in property you occupy rather than let, that is the structure that unlocks it.

Mpact has sold its Paarl property for R185 million. The packaging group is turning an owned property into cash, the second corporate this month to do it. Watch this pattern: manufacturers and retailers sitting on owned industrial property are increasingly willing to sell it. That is stock coming to market from sellers who are not property people.

Accelerate has cut its debt by R1.2 billion in under a year. The Fourways Mall co-owner's debt has fallen from R3.8 billion to about R2.6 billion since October, on asset sales including a BMW dealership for R174 million in July. Its debt still dwarfs a market value of R773 million. That is the pressure behind every centre coming to market.

Nobody is guarding Joburg's power network. The DA says City Power has no contracted security presence and no patrol vehicles across its network, after 17 mini-substations were vandalised in Randburg in four weeks. City Power has not confirmed it. What is confirmed: the utility spent over R300 million on theft repairs in 2024/25, and it runs 18,000 substations.

A hospital group ran 19 facilities and got 19 electricity bills, so a building quietly wasting money was virtually invisible. Until they unified it and started measuring consumption the same way all over: per bed, per area and against how full the building actually was.

Suddenly, they could rank facilities against one another, and the culprit became immediately apparent — the data helped cut 20% off the group's electricity use, which is ~R950,000 a month, or ~R11.4 million a year.

The buildings didn’t change; the way they measured consumption did.

Built. A newsletter by The Awareness Company.