Balwin seeks JSE listing
One of the largest sectional title home builders in South Africa plans to seek a listing on the main board of the JSE.
|||Johannesburg - Balwin Properties, one of the largest sectional title home builders in South Africa, plans to seek a listing on the main board of the JSE. It is still subject to the required approvals.
Stephen Brookes, Balwin’s founder and chief executive, said yesterday that the planned listing was an exciting and important next phase in the evolution of the company.
Balwin is owned 70 percent by management and 30 percent by private equity partner, Buffet Investments.
“Listing on the JSE will grant us access to the capital markets and enhance our profile. It will also support our strong development pipeline and geographical expansion,” said Brookes.
Brookes said a new strategic initiative by Balwin was to develop, retain and manage a portion of future developments as a rental portfolio. The company wanted to increase the residential units it managed by 2 000 to 3 000 units, valued at between R2 billion and R3bn by 2020.
He said the ultimate aim was to spin the portfolio out of Balwin and list it separately as a residential real estate investment trust (Reit).
Brookes said it would take them about four to five years to develop a residential rental portfolio of that scale.
“But it will be demand driven and we can control rate of delivery. We don’t want empty apartments,” he said. The directors of Balwin already owned 300 residential rental apartments.
Jonathan Weltman, the financial director at Balwin, said the rental portfolio would allow it to diversify its income stream by providing the company with separate annuity income apart from the profit on the sale of the construction units – and the flexibility to move to rental should interest rates rise.
Capital uplifts
The company would also benefit from the anticipated capital uplift from not selling certain units immediately.
Brookes said since the company’s establishment in 1996, Balwin had developed, marketed and sold more than 70 prominent residential estates, comprising about 13 500 residential units, with the bulk of these done since 2005.
Apartments developed by Balwin were normally in the R599 900 to R1 699 900 price range, and were targeted at the middle-income population category.
Brookes said high market demand for quality housing in this target price range – combined with the company’s strong project management capability – would result in Balwin selling more than 1 600 units this year and delivering an after-tax profit, excluding one-off listing costs, of about R550 million for the financial year to February next year.
Balwin had a secured project pipeline, he said, of about eight years which, together with continually identified land acquisitions, was expected to drive future growth.
The company had secured sufficient land in Johannesburg, Pretoria and the Western Cape to develop about 17 000 homes. Sales of these would generate anticipated revenue of about R25.5bn at a target gross profit margin of about 40 percent.
Balwin is projecting growth of more than 25 percent in annual profit after tax to more than R500m in the year to February 2017, along with a full-year dividend yield of between 3.5 percent and 4 percent.
Apart from the company’s existing project pipeline, Brookes said, it was negotiating the acquisition of additional land in Kyalami, on which about another 15 000 sectional title residential units could be developed. This would probably be the biggest residential development in South Africa.
BUSINESS REPORT