Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa September 2015 | Page 52

STRATEGIES The Deal South Africa’s new property investment show BY DREW HOOK T he highs and lows of the world of property investing are showcased in The Deal, a South African reality TV show created by Gawie Venter and filmed by Howard James Fyvie a local film producer based in Cape Town. The Deal focuses on Gawie Venter, a passionate property entrepreneur and real estate investor from Somerset West in Cape Town, who has a successful history of investing himself and helping investors buy and sell property. Gawie, the creative force behind the show, hopes to create a unique format of showing the South African Property Industry how property is bought, sold, renovated, and leased. The shows specific focus is on the buying of below market value commercial properties, and through a process of renovation and shared interest, extracting the potential value from them. Throughout the series viewers, along with the production crew, will be taken on a journey across the South African property landscape, to examine the potential of degraded property, the risk of investing in the building, and the challenges involved with the renovation and restoration. The raw reality of deadlines, unrealized goals, and the practicalities of renovation are front and centre throughout The Deal. Viewers are given an in depth look at the behind-the-scenes action, where the renovation team struggles with unmet commitments, delayed deadlines and constant plan B’s during the renovation process. The Deal opens with the purchasing of a rundown and derelict commercial building in Klerksdorp with the intention of renovating and restoring the project within an allocated budget. The team hopes to have a tenant occupying the building after the specified renovation time frame of a month. An important aspect of the show, and one in which Gawie is passionate about, is using the opportunity to train up the next generation of property entrepreneurs from within the townships by offering them an opportunity they may not normally have had. Throughout the series four previously disadvantaged people will be given training to be able to be successful in property and business themselves. In turn they will use those skills to inspire four more people, each of which taking their skills forward. For the first episode Lwazi Ngalo, an aspiring marketer headhunter from Khayelitsha Township, Cape Town, is given the goal of finding a suitable tenant for the renovated building. The Deal aims to showcase the trials and tribulations of property investment in South Africa. Anyone who has been through the process will recognize the struggles, triumphs, successes and failures that mark such a project, while those first time buyers will gain a new insight and understanding into the processes of purchasing, renovating and selling property in South Africa. RESOURCES Telos Group, thedeal.tv 50 SEPTEMBER 2015 SA Real Estate Investor www.reimag.co.za