January 10 2025 10:00
Portside Tower, source: Accelerate Property Fund
Embattled JSE-listed Accelerate Property Fund, which lost billions of rand in perceived market value for investors under the stewardship of former CEO Michael Georgiou and managing director Andrew Costa, has been forced to sell Portside Tower and other assets. Accelerate is struggling with managing its debt payments.
Its current management of CEO Abri Schneider, CFO Marelise de Lange and COO Pieter Grobler are trying to right-size the company’s assets. Its core assets will remain in the Fourways node where it is the majority holder of Fourways Mall, the largest mall in South Africa at 178 000m². Accelerate will sell the tower which has FNB as an anchor tenant, for just under R600m. The tower stands at 136m with 30 floors and about 50,000m² of office space. Its tenth floor features a balcony with views of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Foreshore.
It appears that Accelerate is gradually exiting the Western Cape. It is selling the Oceana Group’s head office in the Foreshore and the Thomas Pattullo building. The sales don’t stop in the Western Cape. In Johannesburg, Accelerate is selling The Buzz Shopping Centre and the adjacent Waterford Centre in Fourways, with the expected proceeds from these two sales totalling around R215m.
As of the end of September 2024, Accelerate had a net debt of R3.7bn. The majority of this debt (R3.3 bn) is set to mature on 31 March 2025, with some notes from the JSE’s domestic medium-term note (DMTN) programme expiring at the end of February.
As much as R1.8bn of the debt comes from the DMTN programme, while an additional R1.2bn is owed to Rand Merchant Bank, a part of First Rand.
Following the sales programme, Accelerate will hold onto five core properties: Fourways Mall, Cedar Square, BMW Fourways, Bosveld Mall in Bela-Bela and the Citibank head office in Sandton.
Accelerate is the co-owner of Fourways Mall with Azrapart which is a company created by Michael Georgiou’s family. His late father Nic ran the Picvest and Highveld Syndication Schemes which were likely Ponzi schemes. At the time of his death he owed investors around R4.6bn.
Accelerate listed on the JSE on December 12 2013 with around R5.9bn worth of assets which represented the assets built up by the Georgiou family over more than four decades. Accelerate’s market capitalisation at listing was R1.2bn with a R4.99 share price. Today the cap sits at R883m and the group trades at R0.47 a share.
alistair@propertyflash.co.za
