Andrew Stegmann

What You’ll Get For Your Money Renting A Home In South Africa

house_gauteng_sandton_sunninghill_1410129456265574707-620x350Foreign buyers are not the only ones finding great value in South African property. So are international executives, professionals and diplomats who rent homes while on assignment there.
Real estate companies are struggling with rising vacancies and unpaid rents in South Africa, where growth is forecast by the central bank to slow to less than 1 percent this year, according to Bloomberg.
“The drop in the value of the rand has made it almost ridiculously inexpensive for those earning in euros, pounds or dollars to rent property here, while also enjoying a relatively high standard of living,” says Andrew Schaefer, managing director of property management company Trafalgar, in a press release.
Trafalgar manages more than 65,000 residential properties in 1200-plus developments and estates in South Africa’s main cities.
Rental yields were less than 8 percent in 2015 across the company at Growthpoint, South Africa’s largest property company by market value, CEO Leon Norbert Sasse told Bloomberg. The company could probably borrow at rates of about 9.5 percent, Sasse said.

http://afkinsider.com/121409/youll-get-money-renting-home-south-africa/

Andrew Stegmann

What Global Brands Look For In African Advertising Agencies

Global consumer brands are changing their view of sub-Saharan Africa as a mixture of have-and have-not economies and considering it as an important economic bloc, says Josh Dovey, CEO Africa for the Omnicom Media Group.
Dovey is head of U.S.-based Omnicom’s media activities in sub-Saharan Africa. In South Africa, Omnicom includes the OMD and Phd media agencies, and digital and out-of-home specialists (which includes shopping malls and billboards).

i_love_africa_by_biga_nt-d5clqmo
Dovey co-founded OMD in 1996 with business partner Gary Westwater. It’s South Africa’s biggest media agency with nearly $500 million in annual billings and a client base that includes Standard Bank, Massmart, Distell, Spar, McDonald’s, Nissan, Renault and Beiersdorf.
Typically, media agencies are responsible for their clients’ media strategy, which includes campaign planning, and buying advertising and marketing space. Outlets include radio, TV, print, and out-of-home.
Omnicom’s emphasis on Africa is typical of global media and communications groups, which have extended their interests across many countries in recent years.
Omnicom SA has established a presence in several major markets, and these will be integrated into the global network. Among them is a significant share in a leading Nigerian media agency.
Omnicom may also be eyeing a South African acquisition.

Source

Andrew Stegmann

‘Well-dressed’ ATM crooks target CPT tourists

Cape Town – Smartly dressed, well-spoken fraudsters lurking around Cape Town ATMs are scamming international tourists out of thousands of rands in a complex syndicate.atm

This is according to a warning from the Cape Town Central Improvement District (CCID) about a spike of ATM theft from this syndicate in 2016.

The syndicate operates in a group of between four to six fraudsters and their modus operandi includes dropping high-value cash notes on the floor to distract tourists. The fraudsters then also speed off in rental cars after committing the theft, according to the CCID.

The syndicate has targeted more than one ATM on a daily basis this year, and each fraudster performs a different role such as watching tourists enter PINs or stealing cards, said Muneeb Hendricks, the safety and security manager at CCID.

“What they do is they tend to lurk close by ATMs in their vehicles. Smartly dressed, well-spoken guys. Maybe now and again there will be a lady with them as well, but mostly a group of men,” Hendricks told Fin24.

Source

Andrew Stegmann

Industry faces crippling shortage of foreign-language guides

If left unaddressed, the shortage of foreign-language guides will become a crisis, members of the industry have warned.Industry-faces-crippling-shortage-of-foreign-language-guides-800x400

Jenny Briscoe, CEO of Gold Class Guides, said there simply were not enough guides speaking foreign languages. According to Alisha Kirk, Guide Manager at Tourvest, while many guides were able to speak more than one language this was more often than not local languages. “We have a major shortage of guides who are able to speak foreign languages and then a wide variety of foreign languages at that.”

Both Kirk and Briscoe pointed out that tour groups were being turned away because of a lack of foreign-language guides. According to Briscoe, a shortage in especially German, Italian, French and Mandarin existed. “We are just not able to service the German tour groups coming into the country as we don’t have enough German-speaking guides,” she said. “The same goes for Chinese. We have a shortage of guides who can speak Mandarin.” French and Italian speaking guides were also few and far between.

Source