On 4 November, the people who own the flats and offices where South Africans work and live will be watching the ballot closely, because the outcome will shape who runs the councils their buildings depend on. That was the undercurrent running through the South African Property Owners Association’s (Sapoa) 60th annual convention, held last month at Sun City, where landlords, developers, lenders and fund managers gathered with local government elections looming.
The mood was set by CNN’s Richard Quest, who told a plenary that “we change at the speed of pain.” His point was blunt. South Africa usually waits until things get bad enough before it fixes them. Most delegates in the room wanted to know how much more pain property owners must absorb before change arrives.
Professor Adrian Saville of the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) delivered a keynote that pulled no punches. The economy has been stuck at roughly 1% growth for about 15 years. Production sectors such as mining made up around half of the economy in 1980; today they account for less than a fifth. Saville called the economy “hollowed out” and noted that income per person is lower than it was in 2010.
For anyone who owns property, those numbers are not abstractions. A building earns money only if someone pays to use it. Offices need companies that are hiring; flats need tenants with jobs. When an economy barely grows for 15 years, demand for space grows slowly, and so do rentals and values. Saville said Sapoa members sit at the centre of South Africa’s growth engine, and if the engine stalls, the buildings feel it first. He also reminded the room that South Africa remains the most sophisticated economy in the world’s second-fastest-growing region, and that, in his words, the problem is that South Africans have to get out of their own way.
Meanwhile, an economists’ panel, hosted by Quest alongside Saville, Annabel Bishop (chief economist at Investec), Dawie Roodt (chief economist at Efficient Group) and Duma Gqubule (research associate at the Social Policy Initiative), turned feisty fast. Calls for corrupt officials to end up in orange overalls and blunt criticism of the governing party’s record followed. Quest challenged the panellists: everyone knows the problems, so why haven’t they been solved? The same answer kept coming back: investment. When the panel argued that infrastructure fails to attract money because investors have lost trust and that cleaning up roads and towns would help win it back, Quest dismissed the reasoning as trite.
The author, drawing on years in property, pushed back: that is exactly how investors behave. Very few confidently commit capital to a big building project in a town where the streetlights are off and the potholes seem to breed. Fixed investment, money spent on things that last like roads, factories, power lines and buildings, sits at about 14% of GDP, down from around 21% in 2008. The National Development Plan aims for 30% by 2030. The economy grew every year between 2003 and 2008, one panellist noted, and real investment per person has collapsed since. In property, that shortfall shows up as schemes that never leave the drawing board: a developer may hold the land and the approved plans, but if the town around the site is going backwards, the numbers stop working and the project gets shelved.
Gqubule offered a statistic that should trouble anyone who builds for a living. Public-private partnerships have accounted for about 2.5% of public investment in every budget for the past 25 years. The private sector has the money and the know-how; the state has barely used it. He also argued that government spends too much time courting Washington when it should be winning over African and Asian markets. Roodt was harsher, saying around 30 million South Africans receive income from the state every month and that the state is destroying capital rather than creating it. The property link is direct: tenants pay rent from wages and profits, both of which come from a growing private economy.
The ground still to be made up is vast. Official unemployment rose to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, and among young people aged 15 to 34 it stands at 47.4%, according to Statistics SA. A residential landlord in a town where nearly half of young adults cannot find work chases the same small pool of households with a steady income; developers follow that pool into a handful of suburbs while the rest of the city goes without new stock.
By contrast, Bishop was the most optimistic voice. She noted that the ANC’s share of the national vote fell from nearly 70% in 2004 to about 40% in 2024, forcing a coalition government, and credited the business-government partnership with helping. Her ask is to speed up the infrastructure drive. Roodt said Eskom and Transnet had to break before they could be fixed, and that now they had, there was only one way forward: up.
The elections split the panel. Roodt said 4 November could turn out very good or very bad; a weaker ANC might improve accountability but could also fragment the country into unstable coalitions. Saville’s worst-case scenario was two parties on about 20% each with a small kingmaker holding the balance of power. The property stakes are real: municipalities approve building plans, set property rates and run the water and electricity infrastructure outside any building. When a city council changes hands every few months, as Johannesburg’s has in recent years, decisions stall, developers wait longer for approvals and tenants look at other cities. One panellist summed up Johannesburg in a single line: it is exploding and falling apart at the same time.
The cost of money adds pressure. The Reserve Bank raised the repo rate in May and again in September, taking prime to 10.75%. Each increase lifts the cost of financing a building, leaving less room for error when the surrounding municipality fails to deliver. As a former broker might put it, the municipality has become part of the asset: two identical buildings in two cities are not worth the same if one sits under a council that maintains its substations and the other under one that cannot pass a budget on time. Buyers and funders price that in, and on 4 November voters get a say in which kind of council their buildings sit under.
Saville closed his keynote with Muhammad Ali: agility, he said, is being able to choose your speed. Every business takes a punch, and the ones that survive can take it and land a knockout of their own. South African property has absorbed plenty over the past 15 years, from load-shedding to collapsing municipal services, and the sector is still standing. The economy has the bones to grow and the capital is waiting; what is missing is a government at every level that does the basics and gets out of the way. Quest said change comes at the speed of pain. On 4 November, voters decide whether it arrives before the next round of pain or after.