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BUSINESS NEWS - Ground broke on Trotter Street in August. Here is what is going up, and who it is being built for.
There is a hole in the ground on Trotter Street that has been getting steadily deeper since September.
What comes out of it is Oysters & Pearls: 30 apartments on three residential storeys, sitting above a street level of parking and business units in the middle of Knysna.
It is a boutique building rather than a block, designed by Olivier Architects for Oysters and Pearls Property Developers, and it is being built at a scale the town can absorb. Thirty homes are not a development that changes the character of a street. It is a development that fills in a gap on one.
Inside, there are five layouts. They start at 79 and 84m2 two-bedrooms, run up through 121m2 two-bedrooms, and finish with 161m2 three-bedroom penthouses on the top floor. Prices run from R2 990 000 to R4 790 000.
The specification is the part worth reading twice, because this is where this building separates itself from the older stock in town. A heated pool. A lift. EV charging. Double glazing throughout, which in a town centre is as much about quiet as it is about heat.
Access control. A full appliance package, so the apartment is finished rather than nearly finished on the day the keys change hands.
The buyers coming forward fall into three groups, and they want the building for different reasons. Retirees moving out of large properties who want the same town and a tenth of the maintenance. Families semigrating down who need to be able to lock up and leave for three weeks without arranging for someone to water a garden.
And investors who want a letting asset in central Knysna that does not need a caretaker standing by.
What ties them together is that there is very little for any of them to buy. Lightstone figures published last year put sectional title at about 10% of Knysna's housing stock, but close to 20% of its sales.
Apartments trade here at double the rate their share of the market suggests, which is a polite way of saying there are not enough of them. Building new ones in the centre of town means land, parking and a planning process, and most of the time it simply does not happen.
On Trotter Street it is happening. The building is out of the ground, the plans are fixed, and the units are selling off plan while the concrete goes in.
Tracy Boomer is a Property Practitioner with Seeff Knysna.
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