In January of this year, for the first time since Statistics South Africa began disaggregating residential transfer data by title type, sectional title transfers outpaced freehold transfers in all four of South Africa's major metropolitan areas simultaneously. In Johannesburg the margin was narrow — 51.3 per cent to 48.7. In Cape Town it was pronounced: sixty-four per cent of all residential transfers were sectional title. The milestone passed with remarkably little fanfare. But among demographers, urban planners, and the developers who have been quietly building apartment blocks in Rondebosch, Braamfontein, and Umhlanga for a decade, it was expected. The standalone house with a swimming pool and a wall topped with electric fencing is no longer the default South African aspiration.
Michiel Haasbroek is forty-one years old, an architect by training, and the founder of Terras — a Johannesburg-based development company that has delivered eleven sectional title schemes in the last seven years, ranging from twelve-unit Maboneng conversions to a two-hundred-unit mixed-use complex in Sandton. He did not set out to build apartments. He pivoted in 2018, after a series of conversations with buyers in their late twenties and thirties that changed his understanding of the market. "They did not want a house," he tells me in the company's office on Jan Smuts Avenue, surrounded by architectural models. "They wanted optionality. They wanted to lock up and go to Mozambique for three weeks. They wanted not to have an ongoing relationship with a plumber."
The shift is generational but not exclusively so. Among buyers in the R2–R5 million range — the middle tier of the South African residential market — Lightstone data shows preference for sectional title is strongest in the thirty-to-forty-five cohort, but also growing among buyers over sixty. Downsizers who spent two decades maintaining a five-bedroom house in Constantia or Bedfordview are arriving at the sectional title market not as a compromise but as a relief. Cynthia Ferreira, a sixty-three-year-old retired teacher from Pretoria East, sold her freehold property in Faerie Glen last year and bought a two-bedroom apartment in Menlyn Maine for R2.4 million. "I spent fifteen years fighting with my garden," she says. "Fifteen years of pipes and gutters and security upgrades. Enough."
They did not want a house. They wanted optionality. They wanted to lock up and go to Mozambique for three weeks.
The infrastructure behind the shift is as important as the psychology. South Africa's three worst years of load-shedding — 2022, 2023, and 2024 — made large freehold properties suddenly expensive in ways that had not previously been legible to buyers. A home battery and solar system capable of sustaining a four-bedroom property through Stage 6 costs between R180,000 and R280,000. A well-governed sectional title body corporate can centralise that cost, often at a per-unit contribution of between R1,800 and R3,500 per month. Crime has played a role too: the communal security infrastructure of a managed complex — boom gates, CCTV, access control — is increasingly seen as a more reliable deterrent than a private armed response package maintained at individual expense.
What this transition means for South African cities is not a simple improvement. Density done badly — cheaply constructed blocks with inadequate soundproofing and body corporates that cannot enforce their levies — is already appearing in secondary nodes like Polokwane and East London. The Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act of 2016 gives body corporates meaningful powers of governance, but enforcement remains patchy, and the legal system for resolving levy disputes is slow and expensive. Michiel Haasbroek is aware of these failure modes. "The apartment dream sours when the body corporate fails," he says. "Then it is worse than a house, because you cannot simply walk away." His company's developments include a two-year management guarantee. He says most competitors in the mid-market do not bother.
The broader cultural weight of the transition should not be underestimated. For three generations of South Africans — across racial and class lines, though with starkly different material conditions — the standalone house with a yard was not merely a preference but a proof of arrival: evidence that you had the stability, the capital, and the civic belonging to occupy a piece of ground with a number on the gate. The apartment was a way station. Now it is a destination. Whether this reorientation reflects genuine emancipation from an exhausting aspiration, or simply the rationalisation of diminished purchasing power, depends on who you ask. Michiel Haasbroek thinks it is both, simultaneously, and that this is not a contradiction.
