Driving past Sandton on the M1 freeway you can’t help but see a big construction site with three cranes up at the moment. This is the site of Atterbury’s new R3 billion Barlow Park development, which is the topic of our latest episode of The Property Pod.
“The precinct, or the piece of land that sits there where the old Barloworld head office was, is actually quite a bit larger than the two phases that we are starting off with.” “Then we have Divercity [Urban Property Fund], which is an inner-city residential company or developer … and then we’ve got Twin City [Development] and the Moolman Group, which each own effectively 12.5% of the development.”When it was initially conceived, Barlow Park had quite a big office component, with tall glass-facade office buildings.
“If you look at the residential [space] that is available in Sandton, it is still quite expensive. People working in Sandton can’t necessarily afford that level of rent, so people are still forced to stay in townships like Alexandra, commute from Soweto, etc.” “And then within our own precinct, the Old East Precinct in Hazelwood, there are a couple of developments going on. And then also in Cape Town, where we’ve had some successful industrial developments over the last five or six years, we are building a large warehouse for Truworths at the moment, for Takealot, etc. So it’s quite busy at the moment on the development front which, again, we are very blessed and very excited about.