A healthy Edcon is vital for SA’s property giants.
This is evident from a report from asset manager Stanlib, which estimates that the retailer occupies about 6%-7% of the total retail space in the country. In the mainstream malls — such as Sandton City, Victoria Wharf and Gateway — Edcon occupies about 10% of the space.
"On average if we include the whole SA listed-property sector, Edcon’s exposure is about 2.2% of total income [for the sector]," says Keillen Ndlovu, head of listed property funds at Stanlib.
This shows how deeply any failure of Edcon (which looks unlikely) would cut into the property companies.
Ndlovu says Edcon is considering cutting its trading space by between a third and a half, depending on how its trading performance works out.
This would take the form of either shutting underperforming stores when leases expire, reducing the size of underperforming stores, or reducing rent on existing leases.
Ndlovu says Edcon is looking to sign more "turnover-based leases", in which landlords would share the upside or downside of the sales with the tenant.
As it stands, 6.3% of Hyprop’s total portfolio is exposed to Edcon, 5.9% of Liberty Two Degrees is exposed, 5% of Vukile and 4.1% of Resilient.
This comes at a time when property owners are lobbying to amend the Companies Act to give landlords preference over other creditors in business rescue proceedings.
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