It will acquire portions of the property portfolios of soon-tobe-delisted property companies Fairvest Property Holdings and Bonatla Property Holdings.

 Nicky Vontas, CEO of Fairvest and a director of Bonatla, said yesterday Alpina would initially have a market capitalisation of about R350m, but the ultimate aim was to increase this to between R750m and R1bn to compete with the listed property giants. Vontas would act as a consultant for Alpina, but not hold any director position.

 He said the size of a listed property company also had to be weighed up against flexibility.

 "The disadvantage of very large property companies, was that portions of the portfolio become untradeable and obsolete very quickly.

 "Because you're larger, the market judges you on your results and according to the worst portions of your portfolio. You must be big enough to have economies of scale and flexible enough to be able to trade off nonperforming portions of your portfolio."

 He said the new listing would have new independent directors and new management.

 Vontas had said earlier that Fairvest and Bonatla were too small to compete with the leviathans. Bonatla's entire property portfolio had been disposed of for R624m. Thirty-four of these properties were sold to Momentum Property Investments for R433,5m, one to the Marriott Group for R32,15m and another to the VKV Group for R30m.

 Fifteen properties were sold to Gold Edge for R93m.

 The sale of the entire Fairvest portfolio was currently being negotiated for about R300m, said Vontas. He said about 40% of the Fairvest portfolio would probably go to Alpina and the rest to various other parties.

 Vontas said there was value in the property portfolios of Fairvest and Bonatla and the only way to extract this had been to sell off.

 "In Bonatla and Fairvest, the share prices were substantially below the net asset value per share." He said although Alpina would be involved in commercial property, its other legs would include a mortgage origination business, residential property trading and leisure business.