Business and industry may be frustrated at obstacles to growth in East London, but property developers say they see big opportunities.

Novate Property Investments strategic development manager Grant Wheatley says the town is “waking from a big sleep”. Developers are lining up a series of large-scale projects.

Novate, with its construction partner Group Five, has started work on the first phase of what Wheatley says will eventually be a R2bn project “of a size comparable to Johannesburg’s Melrose Arch”. The Triple Point development at Beacon Bay overlooking the Quenera River will include apartment blocks, stand-alone homes, retail and office space, and a 100-room four-star hotel. There will also be an adjoining hospital. If all goes to plan, the first apartment residents will be able to take occupation this year.

The municipality has agreed to build a road linking the development with Gonubie. Long-term, Wheatley hopes the 25ha space will also incorporate features like a theatre, a police station and government departments. “We’ve completed the development blueprint,” he says. “Now we’ll let the market decide.”

Another developer, the Billion Group, says it plans to invest R5bn in the next four years. Projects include a R2,3bn mall next to the town’s Hemingways casino, due for completion in 2009; a R500m shopping mall in Mdantsane township, set to open in April; and the Sinati Coastal golf estate at Gonubie, which won department of environmental affairs approval in December.

Billion chairman Sisa Ngebulana says he wants to see East London become “a golf tourism Mecca and a place with all the major facilities and infrastructure of a great city”.

Other big developments planned include a five-star hotel and two 21-storey luxury apartment blocks in the upmarket suburb of Bunkers Hill — though this nearly-R1bn project faces opposition from local residents, who complain it will spoil their views and create traffic chaos.

There are also preliminary plans for other new hotels, a conference centre, and development of the neglected beachfront esplanade. “There’s nothing there except some tired seafront hotels,” says Wheatley. “It desperately needs something as a focal point for the town. It needs a tourism magnet. Let’s hope it’s done properly.” Previous attempts to create such a magnet by developing the port surrounds into a Cape Town-style waterfront foundered on Transnet’s refusal to sell the land.

Wheatley hopes the various developments will help East London realise its potential as a tourism destination. “We haven’t looked properly at our tourism potential. We’re seen as a cheap family destination but if you look at our facilities and the fabulous coastline, we can be much more than that.”

The challenge is highlighted by market response to the Triple Point residential development. “We advertised extensively in Johannesburg and Cape Town but 98% of sales so far are to local people,” says Wheatley. “People in other cities don’t see East London as a tourism destination. And we’re not taken seriously as an investment market. We have to change that.”

Though he is pleased to see so many developments in the making, he worries about the lack of co-ordination. “I would like East London to be a modern, international city. It must be integrated, not [consist of] pockets of development,” Wheatley says. - David Furlonger

Source: Financial Mail