The name sounds more like a monument from ancient Greece than an apartment block and hotel, but Acsiopolis (pronounced ak-shop-oh-liss) is about as modern-day Sandton as it gets.
Even on the overly ostentatious Sandton skyline the building makes a statement with its imposing size — and that’s before you get to the amenities inside.
It opened quietly in March, extending the never-ending theme of live, work, play that dominates modern property developments.
Situated next to Benmore Shopping Centre, it bills itself as a “city in one place”. Its name — “city of worth” in Greek — attests to its ambition.
It is part apartment block, part hotel, split between @Sandton Apartments and @Sandton Hotel. With 561 hotel rooms and 480 upmarket leased apartments, the complex is said to offer more accommodation than any other in SA, after Sun City.
Then consider this: Acsiopolis has a preschool, a piazza, restaurants, a spa, a whisky and cigar lounge, a deli, conferencing and event facilities (including an 80-seat auditorium), co-working space, a gym, clubhouse, medical suites and car washes.
The reception area is airy with yellow, gold and amber cut glass hanging from the ceiling. The décor is gold and black with occasional sculptures and splashes of colour.
The 21-storey building, boasting 67,000m² of gross lettable area, is owned and developed by JSE-listed Acsion and managed by Anaprop. The project, which cost R1.2bn, has been in the works for ages: the land was bought from Telkom years ago (it was a parking lot), but construction took longer than expected.
Acsion bought the land in 2015 and, after a two-year design process, it broke ground in 2017. It was due to open two years later, but then the Chinese shipping crisis hit. Deliveries were delayed and container prices tripled.
“We’ve weathered many storms,” Astrino Nicoloudakis, chief investment officer at Acsion, tells the FM during an interview in the Acsiopolis restaurant, which has a view of the outside area with its pool, loungers and deck chairs. It’s hard to tell if those around us are on holiday or working — it could be both, in the post-Covid zeitgeist of “bleisure” (business travel/leisure).
Unlike other large residential developments in the area, the apartments are only available for rent, so there is no sectional-title system.
Inflation will force the South Africans who have got the monster-acre house out from the suburbs to the city high-rises
— Astrino Nicoloudakis
Nicoloudakis says economic exigencies are likely to make the Acsiopolis model more attractive.
“Inflation will force the South Africans who have got the monster-acre house out from the suburbs to the city high-rises,” he says. The trend is towards “reasonably priced high-end accommodation”.
Another factor is the collapse of municipal services. The building has backup power and water, so there is no interruption of the kind experienced by the “monster-acre” houses.
Security is another feature: the building is monitored 24/7, with biometric access and licence-plate recognition in all parking areas.
An ‘affordable’ mini-city
Nicoloudakis says the vision for this development goes back to the 1980s and Kiriakos Anastasiadis, who founded the property management company that became Anaprop.
The group listed in 2014, and Acsiopolis was part of the wider development plan for Sandton that included construction of headquarters for Discovery, Sasol and Aon, and the US embassy.
“The plan was to create something that was affordable and of a high standard,” says Nicoloudakis. “When you say affordable, people equate that with cheap — it’s not, it’s the result of value engineering if you’re able to get your costs right. And give a product to the market that is well priced.”
To rent a two-bedroomed unfurnished apartment costs R18,300 a month, rising to R22,400 for a furnished one. Studios are R8,700 unfurnished and R10,600 furnished.
Pricing for residential apartments, after Covid, is critical.
John Loos, property strategist at FNB Commercial Property Finance, expects the average rental for Sandton to decline slightly as the composition of its rental market changes.
He says much of the appeal of an apartment in the business nodes of Sandton or Rosebank is that it minimises time spent in traffic by offering a short commute. But since congestion is less than before the pandemic, and a greater portion of high-income earners may want to work from home, the dynamics have shifted.
“In a post-lockdown world, it may be lower-level employees who spend more time on the premises. So I suspect a larger portion of the rental apartment supply will be with them in mind.”
The densification in Sandton continues apace. There’s the Michelangelo Hotel and The Leonardo, Africa’s tallest building, which offers an early developmental school and is home to the Aurum Restaurant.
Down the road, there’s The Regent, with its own bistro and spa, and property development group Atterbury broke ground in June for the first phase of a R3bn project, Barlow Park.
This intriguing development on the former site of Barloworld’s head office sits at the boundary between the wealthiest and poorest parts of the city — Sandton and Alexandra. Atterbury’s vision is for a “vibrant, modern residential-anchored mixed-use neighbourhood”.
The intention is to provide “affordable, secure residential lifestyle developments” with 4,100 residential units in 11 apartment blocks. It is positioned as the “first truly affordable rental precinct” in the area and will have a Checkers and Clicks among its offerings.
Waldo Marcus, head of marketing and sales at TPN Credit Bureau, says residential vacancies in Sandton improved from 15.89% in the second quarter to 9.7% in the third quarter. That is still above the average national vacancy rate of 7.46%.
Overall we see Gauteng struggling with an oversupply though the perceived demand is improving
— Waldo Marcus
“Overall we see Gauteng struggling with an oversupply though the perceived demand is improving,” says Marcus.
Skills in short supply
Nicoloudakis says no CBD is immune to urban decay — not even Sandton. Occupancies have dropped, as have rental rates, but he says Sandton is still SA’s economic hub.
He says Acsion knows the importance of timing. “We know when to go into the market, we know when to hold it, because we are not overgeared and know how to time the S-curve of development. Only once we’ve tenanted do we move to the next step.”
The reason it took so long to get everything in place, Nicoloudakis says, is that “we don’t have the skills in SA to open a development like this as they do in Dubai or China”.
Acsion, which he says is meeting the challenge by building its human capital, tries to avoid outsourcing. “If you outsource, you give away a lot.”
Take window cleaners: the building has so much glass, it has its own full-time window-cleaning team.
Equally, control of security is “fundamental”, Nicoloudakis says.
“The goal is to put a high-rise equivalent of Steyn City in Sandton. To do that we need to invest in IT and access control, and not have a sectional-title situation where everybody tells you what to do.”
For Acsion, Acsiopolis — its biggest single-phase development — is a departure from its retail-heavy portfolio. “We had too much cash on the balance sheet. We had a lazy balance sheet. We needed to get it to work.”
Nicoloudakis — who puts the market value of the building at R1.4bn — says it is aimed at the business sector, including long-term tenants and foreign executives working for multinationals. Tourists from the UK, Germany and US are also in the mix.
“My ideal tenant — and we have a few upstairs — had a mansion in Bryanston, a house in Cape Town. Their children have left home and they semigrated to Cape Town but they still want a base here in Sandton so they can see friends in Sandton. They downsized to one of our apartments and now they have the opportunity to fly in and out,” he says.
Sandton’s future, Nicoloudakis believes, relies on getting its transport system right.
“I’m a big fan of eco-mobility — it makes it more pedestrian-friendly, you can get on bikes. That’s the way the world is going — there will be a day where we will walk in Sandton; when that is, I don’t know. You can’t keep on living the same lifestyle you lived in the 1980s.”
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