Durban regenerated :: Cheap Flights to Durban, South Africa

Durban regenerated

South Africa’s biggest port and the lush coastline to its north are booming, despite concerns about security

Ellmarie Spencer has a potential customer on the phone with 5m rand (£330,000) to spend. The Durban estate agent is blunt: “You won’t get beachfront for that – houses are all 15 million and upwards.”

The conversation over, she fills me in on property prices on her beat: the upmarket residential and holiday enclaves of La Lucia and Umhlanga Rocks, on the northern edges of South Africa’s busiest port city.

“In the past three years, prices have gone up, but before that it was static, so all we’ve done is play catchup,” Spencer says. “Building costs go up by 20% a year, so property prices should double every five years.” She believes a rise of 15% a year is a reasonable prediction.

All the way from the Point, an area of ambitious but as yet unrealised regeneration of the “crime and grime” inner city by Durban’s docks, via the thriving new business parks and seafront flats of Umhlanga (pronounced “Umshlanga”), to the acres of sugar cane being razed in favour of “lifestyle” developments with Indian Ocean views, South Africa’s subtropical northern coastline is starting to rival the property scene in the Cape, until now the destination for most British buyers.

The infrastructure improvements that form part of the nationwide preparations for the 2010 World Cup have much to do with it. A new stadium is ahead of schedule; even better, a new airport, also due to open in time for the footie fest, will allow direct flights from Europe, making the area more accessible to British and Irish holidaymakers – and more attractive to investors.

There is a “huge” domestic population movement into the area, according to Peter Cameron, a sales executive at Elan, a local developer. “Jo’burgers move their families here and commute.” A more efficient airport will aid that process: the breadwinner can head to work on a Monday happy that his family is in a more secure environment than the crime-rid-den economic capital.

But just how secure? For a visiting Briton, the dominant feature of the properties, from seafront flats to golf-course developments, is the level of security in place. Electric fences, guarded gatehouses, ferocious dogs, rigorous monitoring of the small army of domestic workers and all manner of fancy alarm systems speak of a level of threat way beyond our comfort zone: the inequalities of the apartheid era still loom large in the Rainbow Nation.

Once past the security cordon, though, one could easily be seduced by what is on offer. There’s the luxurious Villa Venestia’s 1,400 square metres of living space, on a double beachfront plot, for £2.5m. Or what about a beachfront home with a magnificent, antebellum-style portico and bachelor-pad specifica-tions? For £1.05m, you get two pools and an open-plan living space; the “bar kitchen” has a large utility room behind it, for hiding the real mess (a popular feature in newer homes here).

Or there are the apartment blocks on the seafront at Umhlanga Rocks. Spencer’s agency, Pam Golding Properties, is selling “sectional title”, a version of shared freehold, on a fourbed, four-bath duplex with large terraces and direct beach access in one of these, the Waterfall, for £785,000. “A lot of the buildings, like this one, don’t allow holiday rentals,” Spencer admits. “But you could do three- or six-month corporate rentals for about £2,000 a month.”

As more and more businesses, including branches of international consultancies and finance corporations, move into the Ridge area of Umhlanga, this market is growing, but the pace of development seems to be keeping up. Near the Waterfall, the enormous Pearls scheme is taking shape: five blocks of flats, some already occupied, including a shiny 23-floor blue tower that looks like a slice of Dubai in Durban, with landscaped roof gardens and a huge tank of tropical fish in the lobby.

A few British buyers have already invested in the first phases, where it’s now resales only. In one such transaction, a flat that was bought for about £330,000 in 2005 sold for almost £450,000 in December.

Another agent, Wakefields, is selling a 250-square-metre home with a wrap-around terrace on the 10th floor of the tower for £650,000, and is preparing to launch 80 flats in phase five, ranging in size from 100 to 250 square metres. Prices are still to be announced.

In downtown Durban, rather less glam-orous options are available just beyond the derelict, dodgy-looking buildings at the end of Mahatma Gandhi Road – a no-go area after dark. This is the Point, the target of that regeneration effort: a shopping, restaurant and theme-park area, known as uShaka Marine World, in homage to the great Zulu king, is already drawing tourists.

You can see the performing dolphins doing their synchronised routines from a £420,000, 540-square-metre flat on the 22nd floor of the Spinnaker, a 26-floor development where units are still available. Two-bedders cost £112,500; three-bedders £180,000. Other new apartment blocks and hotel development sites cluster around canals, part of the intricate water engineering needed to keep the dolphins and other aquatic residents of uShaka happy, and a marina is planned.

The area ticks several investment boxes: waterfront living, lots of public investment, gentrification (some charming Victorian clapboard houses have been restored into pleasant homes priced from £240,000), a decent supply of professional renters and 24-hour dedicated policing. Even so, the Spinnaker, which was launched four years ago, still has properties available, so owners looking to sell on are competing with new-build deals.

Other developers, meanwhile, are looking to the open spaces of the north coast, where it is predicted that 21,000 new homes will be built within the next decade. One place they routinely cite as inspiration is Zimbali, urging potential buyers for their own schemes to look at this upmarket coastal resort, near Ballito, which includes a boutique hotel, a golf course and private homes and is already a well-established community. They are particularly keen to emphasise the phenomenal market performance there since its launch in 1997: prices have risen by 30% a year. Building is still going on at Zimbali, which will have 1,800 homes on 700 hectares once completed. Those coming up include flats from £396,000 and 1,000-square-metre beach villas from £1.98m, which will be marketed in conjunction with the forthcoming Fair-mont hotel.

On two miles of virgin beach north of Ballito, now that a complex Zulu land claim has been resolved, Elan is building Blythe-dale, which will have 1,000 freehold plots and 2,200 flats, some on an Ernie Els-designed golf course. Its hotel and leisure facilities, Cameron says, include “the biggest swimming pool in Africa – even if it is only by a centimetre”.

It is hoped that the scheme will rival Zimbali, and an Anglo-Irish consortium has paid just under £400,000 each for 21 1,000-square-metre frontline beach plots to develop. Two-bedroom flats will start at about £65,000, Cameron estimates, and you could buy a plot and build a three-bedroom house (with project-management services) from about £150,000.

Throughout the area, prices are tempting, and the size and scale of the properties, when compared to, say, a standard seaside villa in Spain, are impressive. The endless beaches and warm cobalt waters are also seductive. The security, though, will remain in place as the growing number of “haves” try to protect themselves from the “have-nots”. Land claims affect farmers and some new development sites, not individual homeowners, and developers are trying to resolve them and release more sites for building.

Ian Fife, a property writer with South Africa’s Financial Mail, says prices in the Durban area have slowed, and some developers are being overly ambitious, especially since high domestic interest rates and political insecurity have slowed the overall market. He predicts this will remain sluggish for a year or so – which might, he says, make now a good time to buy.

“Durban is Johannesburg at play, and income and wealth there are predicted to treble or even quadruple. Those people will want to buy or rent for holidays, and that will underpin demand. The prime places will equal, if not exceed, Cape Town.”

Flights to Durban

Latest News & Events

Emirates drops plans to fly direct to Durban

Costs rise for 2010 World Cup in South Africa

Durban regenerated