July 16, 2026
The question we are asked more than any other is whether the Atlantic Seaboard property market is a bubble. The short answer is no, and the reason is not optimism. It is that the demand underneath the price is real, the supply is genuinely constrained, and the money paying for it is not borrowed. Of the residential sales recorded between the Waterfront and Llandudno last year, roughly eighty percent were cash. A bubble is built on leverage and belief. This market is being paid for in full, and mostly by South Africans.
That is the answer. The rest of this earns it.
BBG CEO, Paul Berman has been developing on this coastline since 1994, through every high and every low, and he tracks the market himself rather than taking the industry's word for it. The figures he works from are consolidated through Propstats from agency uploads, which is an imperfect instrument, because not every agency uploads. He will tell you that himself. But the pattern it shows is consistent enough to build a business on.
From 2021, sectional title and freehold sales from the Waterfront to Llandudno held at roughly R5.6 to R5.7 billion a year. That number barely moved through Covid. Then in 2025 it jumped 46 percent, to R8.2 billion. Inside that number are two figures worth sitting with. Foreign buyers have consistently accounted for 29 to 30 percent of sales, which means seventy percent of this market is local. And of the R8.2 billion, only twenty percent was mortgage financed. The rest was cash.
"There has been a lot of cash sitting on the sidelines waiting for proper investment,"
Paul says. He counts himself among the converted. He remembers watching markets implode during Covid and wanting to touch and feel a physical asset. "There is inherent, fundamental value, and over time it will reach its value."
Price per square metre tells the same story from another angle. There was a time when achieving R50,000 a square metre on this coastline was a struggle. Then it was R80,000. Then R100,000. In parts of Clifton it is now north of R200,000. None of that happened by accident, and the part most people miss is that Sea Point was not always somewhere anyone wanted to be.
Twenty years ago it was in poor condition. Paul can name the cause precisely. When the Waterfront opened, it pulled the anchor tenants out of the Sea Point high street. The landlords who remained still had bonds to service and overheads to carry, so out of desperation they took whoever would fill the space. The tenant mix deteriorated, and the decay followed from there. What resulted was a strange disconnect: multimillion-rand homes on the slopes of Lion's Head, Bantry Bay, and Fresnaye, sitting directly above a high street nobody wanted to walk down.
Most people looked at that gap and saw risk. We looked at it and saw an arbitrage. We lived in the area. We understood the temperature of it.
Fixing it took capital before it took confidence. About twenty years ago, property owners and developers, ourselves among them, founded the City Improvement District, a top-up to what the city provides. It funds 24-hour security along the main road. It funds a private cleansing operation that removes in the region of thirty tons of waste a month over and above the city's collection. It funds social workers who work with the homeless population. None of that is glamorous, and none of it appears in a brochure. It is simply the cost of making an area liveable again, paid by the people who chose to stay in it.
Then came the buildings. The Point Shopping Centre, delivered with our partners at HCI about twelve years ago, was the one that turned the corner. Robert Silke designed it. We spent well beyond what the numbers required us to spend, on the finishes, the glass, the lighting, the tenant mix. Paul remembers sitting there on the first day it opened, on the first of December, genuinely uncertain how the market would respond. It now carries eight to ten thousand people a day. We built four basements and close to four hundred parking bays, and were told at the time that we had oversupplied. Paul's assessment now is blunt: we should have built six.
Dolce Vita followed, on the corner of Church and Regent, with sixty-five residential apartments, The Cole hotel, and Tashas at street level, which opened in December. Station House came before it, and has become the landmark people use to give each other directions. Each one has lifted the block it sits on. A rising tide lifts all boats, and this one was paid for. That is what makes this different from a bubble. A bubble is a price detached from a reason. This is a price attached to twenty years of capital, security, cleansing, design, and tenant mix, in a location where the product cannot be delivered fast enough to meet the demand. We cannot build quickly enough. Scarcity is not a marketing line here. It is the operating condition.
The regulation now arriving does not frighten us either. There are more than twenty thousand Airbnb listings in the Western Cape, which has had a significant effect on long-term rental stock and on yields. Regulation matures a market and stabilises it. We expected it. What it is likely to do is bring long-term rentals back into supply, and open a door for buyers who could not previously get through it. Rates on these properties are moving from a residential to a commercial basis, which will push the cost of holding them up meaningfully. We think the market absorbs that, because the demand underneath it is not fragile.
The lesson in all of this is one Paul would give another developer rather than a reader, and it is not about timing. We have never timed a market perfectly. We have developed continuously since 1994 through every condition, compressed and expanding alike, and the developments that worked were not the ones that caught a wave. They were the ones where we put money into the surroundings, not just the building, and then waited.
Which is why, after all the data, the thing Paul is most fixated on is not a number. It is meeting the purchaser. A development takes four, five, sometimes six years from acquisition through rezoning, consolidation, and design to delivery. A buyer commits roughly eighteen months before completion, on the strength of a drawing and a vision. Paul meets almost every one of them, and he has turned people away when the fit was wrong. Then, years later, he hands them the keys in person. Some of them cry. First-time buyers, mostly, who did not expect what they walked into.
That is the part that does not appear in the sales data, and it is the reason the sales data looks the way it does. You do not build an area back by buying at the bottom. You build it back by putting in more than the site asks for, for long enough that other people can afford to believe in it. We have been doing that on this coastline for more than thirty years, and we are not finished.
Read more about our developments across the Atlantic Seaboard at bermanbros.co.za.
