Cape Town, South Africa · Member since 2016 · 16 posts · 11 votes
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!
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.
Contractor · Graham, NC · Member since 2017 · 18 posts · 4 votes
7y
Hey @Wihan VanWyk, Were you able to find some opportunities? I recently found one that my wife and I are considering, but I'd love to talk with someone else who is already involved to get a better understanding of the market.
Investor · Roodepoort, Gauteng · Member since 2016 · 1 post · 1 vote
7y
Hi @Wihan VanWyk a simple method I use to to search for multi family properties on PROPERTY24 and PRIVATE PROPERTY is to view all properties and then sort by number of bedrooms. It’s not a perfect system but it usually returns most of the multi family properties both in commercial and normal sections of the sites.
Another thing to consider is to look at specific properties that you are interested in (usually neglected properties fitting my criteria, for me), then do a Windeed/lightstone search on it to find out who the owners are, and then approach them directly.
Based in Pta and mostly doing flips at this stage.
There was a time when I was into communes with granny flats etc. I think that is one way to get close to what they call multi-family in the US. Only problem is that it is quite hard to do "granny flats" completely legal.
I am also interested in Multi-Family investments in SA(especially in Pta).