Retail Property: A Real-Asset Class South African Investors Often Overlook

When investors think about real-asset opportunities in South Africa, the conversation usually goes straight to mining, logistics or large agricultural land. Retail property rarely gets the same attention, despite being one of the most established and best-understood real-asset categories in the country.

That gap is partly reputational. The last decade has seen real pressure on regional and super-regional shopping centres, as online retail and changing consumer behaviour reshaped demand. But treating all retail property as equally exposed to that pressure misses an important distinction: convenience and community retail — well-located centres anchored by groceries, pharmacies and essential services — has behaved very differently from large discretionary-spend malls.

From a manufacturing and operational background, I tend to look at retail property the way I'd look at a production line: where is the bottleneck, and where is the resilience built in? A centre anchored by a national grocery chain, in a catchment with genuine population density and limited new supply, behaves like a piece of essential infrastructure. Footfall doesn't depend on discretionary spending cycles the way a fashion-anchored mall does.

The screening questions for retail property are not fundamentally different from any other real asset: who owns it, what is the tenancy mix and lease expiry profile, what are the vacancy trends in the specific catchment, and what capital expenditure is actually required to keep the asset competitive. Retail property ages quickly if it isn't reinvested in — a tired centre loses anchor tenants, and anchor tenants are very expensive to replace.

For investors with a genuine appetite for real assets, well-located convenience retail deserves a place on the list — not as a contrarian bet against e-commerce, but as a recognition that some forms of retail are tied to daily life in a way that's much harder to disrupt than the headlines suggest.