Good news about Cape Town’s biggest shopping centre

Canal Walk in Cape Town receives an estimated 1.68 million visitors in a month, making it one of the most popular malls in the country.

Canal Walk is Cape Town’s largest shopping centre, offering a wide selection of stores with thousands of local and international brands.

The mall has 369 stores and a retail gross lettable area (GLA) – the amount of space that can be rented out to a tenant – of 147,834 m². For reference, the biggest shopping centre in the country, Fourways Mall, has a GLA of 178,202 m².

Canal Walk is based in Century City, an area that was previously owned by Ilco Homes, a listed company. It is located next to the N1 between Cape Town and Paarl.

This company had started developing entry-level housing on a neighbouring site to the north, separated by a railway line from what is now known as Century City.

After Ilco had encountered financial difficulties, its bankers were left in limbo until another Cape Town developer, Monex, headed by businessman Martin Wragge, stepped in.

Wragge realised that the only way to save the land was to rezone it from residential to mixed-use, as the significant amount of infrastructure required could not be sustained by housing alone.

Therefore, Monex began the development in 1997, and Canal Walk opened in 2000. Despite early scepticism of Wragge’s plan, major corporates like PwC and Vodacom gradually moved in.

Unfortunately, Monex’s Ratanga Junction, a well-known amusement park the company had developed, was overcapitalised and struggling financially, which eventually led to the company’s downfall.

Luckily, Canal Walk and Century City were still performing well. In 2004, Rabie Property Group, one of the country’s largest and most successful property developers, acquired the remaining land and encouraged further development in the area.

The timing of this acquisition could not have been better, as it occurred just at the start of an economic upturn. 

Century City has development rights totalling more than 1,25 million square metres of bulk, and at the time Rabie took over, the built form stood at around 255,000 square metres.

A significant amount of development has taken place over the past decade, with just over one million square metres of bulk currently built or earmarked for development and total investment standing at more than R21 billion.

Canal Walk shopping centre

Canal Walk is co-owned by two local property companies – Ellerine Brothers and Hyprop Investments. The latter boasts the largest stake, at 80%.

Hyprop recently released its interim results for the six months through December 2024, which provided insight into the company’s performance, including Canal Walk’s.

In the first half of its 2025 financial year, Hyprop’s distributable income was up 14.5%, from R668 million in the first half of the 2024 financial year to R765 million.

The company’s distributable income per share rose by 14.4%, from 176.1 cents per share to 201.4 cents.

This impressive growth was driven by strong performances in the company’s South African and Eastern Europe portfolios.

The South Africa portfolio saw tenants’ turnover increase by 4.9% while trading density grew by 4.4% in the six-month period.

The Eastern Europe portfolio delivered an even stronger performance, with tenant turnover increasing by an impressive 8.8% while trading density grew by 7.1%. This portfolio’s vacancy rate also remained exceptionally low at 0.2%.

Hyprop’s results presentation also revealed more about Canal Walk’s performance in the six-month period.

The shopping centre’s tenants’ turnover grew by 4.2% to R4.31 billion, and its trading density – the sales generated per square meter of the mall – increased by 3.2% to R4,934 per m² per month.

Canal Walk’s total foot count was 10.1 million over the six-month period, meaning an average of 1.68 million people visited the mall every month.