The surprising growth experienced by the Rawson Property Group’s 41Cape Peninsula residential rental franchises in the last year is likely to be taken up a further notch or two in the next few months as a result of their appointing another franchisee in this sector and, once again, giving him a very wide area in which to operate.
Irwin Heinrich, who has now had some eight years in property, most of it with the Rawson Property Group’s Newlands franchise, where he handled rentals and later sectional title sales, has bought a new franchise from the group, to be called Rawson Rentals Cape Metro M4.
Operating from offices above Freewheel Cycology, diagonally across from Noyes Chemist in Standard House, Kenilworth, Heinrich will be serving an area that stretches from Simon’s Town and Kommetjie to Sea Point and Bloubergstrand, but will not include Macassar and the towns in the Helderberg Basin.
Discussing his prospects recently, Heinrich said that, even by the most conservative estimates, rentals in the Greater Cape Town area had, over the last year, risen at least by 7 to 8% and the challenge now is almost always to find stock, which is very much in short supply. Tenants, he said, are available in large numbers and one has only to advertise to find them.
Heinrich said that he would initially be focusing on units in the rental range of R5,000 to R10,000 per month because this is where the main demand is, but he is ambitious to also take on larger and more glamorous homes.
“My experience at the Newlands franchise,” he said, “has shown that rentals of up to R30,000 per month or more can be quite easily achieved today, provided the properties are sound.”
By the end of his first 12 months in operation, said Heinrich, he expects to have rented 60 homes in his portfolio and to double that figure in the following year. He also expects within the new few months to be employing at least two agents.
“I do hope,” he concluded, “to convince as many people as possible that it is a wise move to use a rental property agent. Time and again it has been shown that the relatively small fee that we and others charge for this service is more than compensated for by our reliability and our ability to find satisfactory tenants and we relieve the landlords of a great deal of worry and irksome problems in the handling of tenants. Special skills are required, not only for the selection but also in the management of tenants and it is a proven fact that some of the Rawson rental managers are operating with less than 3% bad debt. We will work along the same lines as they do and be equally efficient.”
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