“In the entire Northern Suburbs of Johannesburg there is now probably no one area that is quite so sought after as Dainfern Golf Estate – its innate quality and its high prices put it in a class all of its own.”
This is the view of Steven Goosen and Lisa Burgess, the Rawson Property Group’s franchisees for this precinct – and in Goosen’s case for Fourways as well. Together the two franchisees employ 15 agents.
The 302 ha Dainfern Golf Estate, said Goosen, now has 1,200 completed housing units. These are in 11 separate villages with eight children’s playgrounds attached or nearby. Typically the homes will be freehold properties on 1,000 m2 erven and they will have anything from 250 m2 to 500 m2 of floor area, making these among the larger homes in Johannesburg. Carefully applied design guidelines have ensured that no one home can detract from the overall appeal and harmony of any precinct — and landscaping throughout the property is excellent.
Prices vary from R3,5 million to R12 million, with the majority of sales taking place around R5 million. The average price of a home sold over the last year was R4,899,000, which means that this estate rivals such upmarket precincts as Constantia in Cape Town. Exceptionally high prices are by no means rare here: one home currently being sold is priced at R19,5 million.
Figures recently released by the respected analysts Lightstone, who use Deeds Office figures, indicate that year-on-year prices have risen at 24,9% – and prices have been rising steadily, albeit at a slow rate, since 2010.
It is not hard, said Burgess, to understand why Dainfern is so immensely popular and sought after. It is not only the safest of all of Gauteng’s gated villages (it is, in fact, the only one to have a top ISO 9,000 security rating) but it also has a magnificent range of entertainment and sporting facilities. These include two Gary Player designed golf courses (with tarred golf cart pathways and some incredibly beautiful water hazards), four tennis courts, two squash courts, two swimming pools, a volley ball court and a network of hiking, jogging, cycling and mountain biking trails. There are also two clubhouses serving meals seven days a week and a conveniently placed retail centre in which the Rawson Property Group now has its offices. All areas not built up are professionally landscaped with indigenous plantings.
The Rawson Property Group’s Dainfern team, which was reconfigured under its new leaders halfway through 2013/2014, are selling two to three homes per month (and one at the nearby Broadacres Estate) and they are confident that they can raise this figure significantly before the end of this year.
The Rawson Property Group team is also handling rentals. Here, too, said Burgess, Dainfern operates to rules of its own, with rents of R25,000 to R90,000 per month being charged. Even on the smaller cluster housing units good rents are now standard.
“Two to three years ago when the impact of the recession was still being felt throughout Dainfern,” said Goosen, “it was possible to rake in a fair amount of stock for sale. Today, however, with demand at its highest level ever and the growing realisation throughout the property sector that Dainfern offers incredible capital creation, we are finding that it takes a great deal of hard work and ongoing canvassing to build up even a reasonably sized stock list. Fortunately, however, our growing reputation in the area and the perception that we are the neighbourhood experts here do enable us to keep a reasonably steady flow of stock coming through for our buyers.”