Learning about Multifamily in South Africa

[Wihan VanWyk]

Hi Everyone!

This is one of my first posts here on BP asking for some advice and help. I successfully purchased my first single family property last year, and it has been working well and is pretty much running on auto pilot now. But having had it for awhile now I became increasingly disenchanted with the scalability of the single family strategy.

So I have systematically started studying up and teaching myself about multifamily investing and I am getting to the point where I want to start looking at potential properties and numbers to get a feel for the market.

But as I started looking into it I have found it exceedingly hard to find any information about the South African multifamily market. The usual public sites like privateproperty.com and property24 does not service this field (at least not as far as I could find), and there is also no South African equivalent of something like LoopNet.

Is there perhaps anyone that has knowledge in this field and that can perhaps point me in this direction. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

  

[Josh Stack]

Hey @Wihan VanWyk,

I have a long term ambition to pick up one rental in Cape Town so I can justify spending Januarys there as a business expense! I love Cape Town. 

Since CPT is such a tourist city maybe you could also consider a simple apt in the city bowl which you could rent out as an Airbnb. 

That said - and without having done a lot of research - it seems like Cape Town could be a good area to invest so long as the laws are favorable (I think they are to foreigners owning property) and if the price/rents ratios are acceptable. Certainly spending dollars so acquire properties denominated in ZAR should be favorable from a forex standpoint.