By Ella Smook
South Africa is experiencing a wave of north-south migration last seen in the mid-1990s, property industry experts say.
Estate agents say their phones are ringing off the hook as Gautengers leave in droves to relocate to the Cape, citing rampant crime and more severe load-shedding there.
Recently, "a clear crisis of confidence" has caused an "upsurge in interest to relocate to the Cape", says Ian Slot of Seeff.
Rael Levitt, CEO of Alliance Group, agrees that there seems to be "a lot of negativity" in the Gauteng area.
Various offices in the group have found that "a lot of people in Johannesburg (are) selling" their properties, he says.
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Their primary destination seemed to be Cape Town and, after that, the Southern Cape, says Levitt.
Both Slot and Levitt say their companies have been inundated with relocation inquiries, and Slot added that these queries were not limited to a particular population or income group.
While Johannesburg power distribution company, City Power, last week announced a new load-shedding plan which could see consumers there facing up to four hours of blackouts at a time, Cape Town on Monday indicated that electricity usage was under control and that power cuts were unlikely in the Western Cape this month.
In fact, should the province continue on its current savings path, it could make a case for being "ring-fenced" out of Eskom's load-shedding schedule entirely.
Slot told the Cape Argus last week that clients had also expressed concern about a run of high-profile "horrific deaths" in Johannesburg, which made them lose confidence in "the ability of the state to deal with crime".
The latest police executive summary of crime statistics confirms that car-jackings and house robberies "most frequently occur in the more affluent suburbs of Gauteng" and that this increased "the chances of somebody well-known being targeted and even killed".
However, because these "5 percent of South Africa's contact crime" were selectively reported, the perception was created that these areas were more dangerous.
But Slot adds that "perception is reality" and statistics meant little to those who lived "behind locked doors" because they considered themselves not to be safe.
"In Cape Town there is not that same perception, people don't live the same way," he says.
Levitt says the mid-90s saw a similar wave of relocations or "semigrations" as they are now called in property circles to Cape Town, which later slowed down and reversed, with people packing up to move back to Gauteng.
"But the trend seems definitely to be reversed again," Levitt says.
Homecoming Revolution, a non-profit organisation which encourages and assists South Africans abroad on their return, said returnees who were not Capetonians were also increasingly choosing the city as their new base in South Africa.
"It is now a lifestyle choice and they opt for Cape Town instead of Johannesburg," said spokesperson Megan Woods.
Employment agencies partnering the Homecoming Revolution had also reported "a lot more interest" in and "significant growth" of the job sector in Cape Town, Woods said.
While many relocators set up their families in the Cape and commuted to Johannesburg for business, many businesses were also opening shop in Cape Town.
Cape Town property guru Theodore Yach said office space vacancies in the CBD currently at 4 percent were at "record lows".
Yach said the reasons for Cape Town being a popular choice to live and work in were self-evident, as the Cape Town Metropole was "generally better managed than elsewhere in South Africa" and offered a "better lifestyle" along with "world-class business infrastructure in all the major office nodes".
Echoing the sentiments of Cape Town Partnership CEO Andrew Boraine, Yach said he would like to believe that the influx into Cape Town was as a result of "pull" and not "push" factors.
- This article was originally published on page 6 of Cape Argus on March 04, 2008
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