Last year, Accelerate Property Fund sold two distressed-looking Fourways properties: The Buzz, which had just lost its anchor tenant Pick n Pay, and Waterford, which has a McDonald's drive-thru and a handful of small shops.

Most people thought Dorpstraat Capital was crazy to buy them for R215 million. But they had a plan: Bring in a stronger replacement anchor (a Woolworths or Clicks), fill the empty space, and run the centres properly. It paid off: A 9.5% yield on the price they paid (meaning R9.50 of rent every year for every R100 spent) versus the 7% to 8% well-let retail centres usually earn.

The trick is buying at "broken price" and earning at "fixed price". The same playbook is working next door at Fourways Mall, where new management dropped vacancies from 16.1% to 9.4% in a year.

The Play:

Work out three numbers for each property: Current rent, full-let market rent and the cost to get from one to the other (renovations, agent fees). If you can buy it at a price that gives you 9% to 10% on the fixed-up rent, you've got the same deal Dorpstraat got. Pulling current rent, market rent and renovation costs per asset usually means digging through individual leases, contractor quotes and old valuations one by one. If you can't see all three in one view per property, you're guessing.

New developments costed twelve months ago are already out of date: Rental escalations are usually tied to inflation, currently 3.1%. So future rent on the building is rising at about 3% a year. But the cost of actually building is rising at 9.4%: Sand is up 15%, timber 8% to 10%, concrete 5.2%, and construction wages 20.5%. That's a six-point gap between what you'll earn and what you're paying to build.

In plain numbers: A development you expected to return 9% is now closer to 7%. The missing 2% went to the contractor and the materials supplier. The fix is a clause called a Contract Price Adjustment Provision (CPAP) in your building contract. It forces the contractor to share the rising costs with you, not pass them straight on.

The Play:

For every development, find two numbers: What you budgeted twelve months ago and what your contractor would charge to build it today. The gap is your missing margin. Then read your building contract: If there's no CPAP clause and no labour escalation cap, renegotiate before you spend another rand.

Office leases in South Africa typically run 5 to 10 years. But tenants now want flexibility, and they'll pay extra for it: JLL's latest research shows offices globally are only 54% full on any given day, against a target of 79%. Companies don't want to be locked into space they can't shed. So they're paying 10% to 15% more rent for short-term (6 or 12 month) office space that's fitted out and ready to move into.

Almost no landlords offer this. Only 3% of corporations globally can find flexible space for more than 10% of their needs. That's not a demand problem, it's a supply problem. Landlords who fit out a portion of their building (say 10% to 20% of the floor space) with desks, meeting rooms and basic furniture, and rent it on short leases at a 10% to 15% premium, are taking the extra margin nobody else is going after.

The Play:

For each office building you own, list the spaces empty now or up for renewal in the next 18 months. Run two scenarios: A normal 5-year lease at market rent or a fitted-out short lease at 10% to 15% above market. Subtract the fit-out cost from the extra rent. In most cases, the flex option wins. Pulling lease expiry dates, current rent and fit-out cost quotes per asset usually means jumping between your leasing schedule, your accounting system and contractor emails. If you can't see all three per asset in one place, you're defaulting to the easy lease, not the profitable one.

Dipula's 20% earnings surge proves the township retail thesis. Dipula Properties reported 20% growth in distributable earnings to R310m for the six months to February. Vacancies dropped to 7%, tenant retention hit 90%, and convenience retail in townships and commuter nodes carried the fund. Guidance upgraded to 7 to 8% for FY2026.

Equites recycles R2.1bn out of the UK into SA logistics. Equites Property Fund sold five UK distribution centres to ICG Real Estate at a 5.5% transaction yield, releasing roughly R2.1bn in cash to pay down floating debt and fund the higher-yielding domestic pre-let logistics pipeline.

Mangaung's value-based refuse charge would penalise premium assets. SAPOA has formally pushed back against Mangaung over a proposed policy to calculate commercial refuse charges on property value rather than waste output. If passed, it functions as an unrecoverable stealth tax on high-value commercial portfolios.

Ekurhuleni's NERSA tariff application "padded by billions." A regulatory review has flagged that the City of Ekurhuleni's latest tariff submission to NERSA contains structural calculation errors and inflated expenses, confirming that commercial portfolios are subsidising municipal balance-sheet leakage through inflated utility bills.

Gold Fields manages a tailings facility over 400 hectares, containing hundreds of millions of tonnes of material. Engineers physically checked instruments across the dam, but one full cycle took close to a month and the financial exposure of getting it wrong ran anywhere from R10 million in NEMA fines to R2 million per day in regulatory penalties, before production losses or social licence.

The fix wasn't more people. Smart sensors at critical points transmitted continuously into a live dashboard, with automatic alerts the moment pressure or water levels moved outside thresholds. Monitoring cycle: ~30 days to real time. Manual effort: down 90%+. Risk visibility: continuous.

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