The golf course was priced before anyone knew what it was worth

A plain-English explanation of the two desktop valuations at the centre of the King David Mowbray disposal, why neither can be a reliable price, and why the public cannot check the basis for either.

The number that decides everything

Before the City can give away a piece of public land, the law makes it do one thing first: work out what the land is worth and put that figure in front of councillors before they vote. Under the Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations, the Council must be informed of the asset's fair market value before it can approve a disposal.

This is not a formality. That number is the basis for the whole decision. It is how councillors judge whether the public is getting a fair deal. If the number is wrong, every decision built on top of it is wrong too.

So the question that matters is simple: is the City's number any good?

The City has produced two desktop valuations

The City's first desktop valuation put the land earmarked for disposal at R171 million (excluding VAT), dated 31 March 2024. That figure is the City's own, set out in the statutory Information Statement (Municipal Asset Transfer Regulations, Regulation 5(3)(b)) that accompanies the disposal Information Pack.

The City has since disclosed a second desktop valuation: approximately R395 million (excluding VAT), dated 31 March 2026. The figure is stated in the Property Development Department's letter of 12 June 2026 refusing an extension of the comment period (personal details redacted), which records "a desktop market valuation by the City's Professional Valuers (valuation date 31 March 2026) arriving at an estimated fair market value of approximately R395 000 000 (excluding VAT)".

On enquiry, the City stated that the increase reflects the inclusion of an additional portion of land in the disposal. The two figures are therefore not a like-for-like comparison of the same land.

The R395 million figure appears in no public document. It was disclosed only after a member of the public asked the City directly, and the reason for the change only after a follow-up question. Neither valuation report, nor the methodology, comparables, or the per-portion breakdown, has been released.

The core problem stands regardless: both are desktop valuations done before the environmental, heritage and rezoning determinations that decide what the land may become. A desktop figure produced before those determinations cannot be a reliable fair market value for MATR Regulation 11. The public is being asked to support a permanent disposal of public land without being shown the basis for the price.

Why the number can't be reliable

Here is the thing most people don't realise about land. A piece of land is worth almost nothing or almost everything depending entirely on what you are allowed to build on it. The same field zoned for one house is worth a fraction of the same field zoned for thousands of homes and a commercial district. The soil doesn't change. The permission does.

That permission comes from a set of legal processes: the environmental study, the heritage study, the water authorisation, and the rezoning. Each one can shrink what is allowed. The flood plain might be ruled off-limits. Heritage might cap the building heights. River setbacks might carve out a chunk. Until those studies are done, nobody knows what the land is actually permitted to become, which means nobody knows what it is actually worth.

When the City produced these desktop valuations, in March 2024 and again in March 2026, not one of those studies had been finalised. No environmental assessment. No heritage assessment. No water authorisation. No rezoning.

So whoever valued the land could not have valued what it is legally allowed to be, because on neither date was it legally allowed to be anything in particular. They had to assume an answer to questions the law had not yet asked. That is the flaw at the root: the price was set before the facts that determine the price existed. It is also why a second desktop valuation, produced on the same untested assumptions, does not fix the first one. It simply moves the guess.

The trap that works against the public either way

There is no version of this guess that ends well for the public.

If the valuer assumed the big upside, a fully built-out mixed-use district, then the valuation has quietly pre-decided the outcome of the environmental, heritage and rezoning processes. Those processes are supposed to be the independent referees that decide how much can be built, and you are not allowed to pre-empt them. The Constitutional Court said so plainly in Maccsand v City of Cape Town in 2012: you cannot substitute or jump ahead of statutory approvals that haven't happened yet. A valuation that bakes in the zoning answer before the zoning question has been asked is legally tainted.

If the valuer did not assume the upside, and priced the land as it sits today, then the public is about to hand over an extremely valuable development asset for a fraction of what it will be worth the moment it is rezoned. And the difference, the windfall created purely by the City's own future rezoning decision, lands with the developer instead of staying with the ratepayers who own the land now.

Pick either reading. The land is either over-valued on assumptions the City wasn't allowed to make, or under-valued and about to be handed over cheap. There is no third option where the number is both legal and fair.

This City has done this before

This is not a hypothetical worry. In 2016 the City sold a piece of public land on the Foreshore, known as Site B, to Growthpoint for R86.5 million. The City's auction documents advertised the site with about 17,500 square metres of development bulk; the actual permissible bulk was around 46,000 square metres, a discrepancy the housing organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi brought to light. Ndifuna Ukwazi estimated that, on the correct bulk, the land was worth closer to R227 million, implying the public may have lost in the region of R140 million. Growthpoint disputes that valuation and maintains it paid a fair price through a legitimate process, and the City's own commissioned valuer arrived at a much lower figure. A forensic investigation called for by the then Mayor in 2018 found no irregularities in the sale, but noted that City officials knew the land could have fetched more and chose to sell it quickly.

The same pattern is the risk here: a public asset valued on the wrong assumptions about what can be built on it, to the public's cost.

The part that should bother everyone

We cannot check which way it has gone, because the City has not released the valuation report. It has not said who the valuer was, what method they used, or what comparable sales they relied on. The single most important number in the entire deal, the one the law requires councillors to see before they vote, is not available to the public that owns the asset.

That is why a formal records request has been filed for the full report, the methodology, the comparables, and the valuer's identity. It is the only way to test whether the foundation of this whole disposal is sound.

More broadly: the City does not publish the basis for its decisions proactively. The second valuation and the reason for the change in the figure were obtained only through direct public questioning, not from anything the City placed in its Information Document or any other public record. That pattern, of disclosing decision-justifying information only when pressed rather than as a matter of course, is precisely the concern raised in Daily Maverick's reporting on the City's planning processes. Nothing here suggests any illegality. But a disposal process that depends on the public asking the right questions to uncover relevant facts is not a process that meets the transparency standard the MATR was designed to enforce.

Being fair to the City

Three things should be said honestly, because the argument is stronger when it can't be picked apart.

First, raw bulk land does genuinely sell for less per square metre than a finished suburban plot. A developer has to fund the roads, the services and the bulk infrastructure, and carries years of risk, so some discount is normal and expected. But the gap here is far larger than a normal bulk discount, and it exists precisely because the City is about to grant the development rights that would close it.

Second, these are reference valuations, not necessarily the final price. The land would be offered to the market through a disposal process, and a deal could be structured so the developer delivers affordable housing and infrastructure instead of cash. That is exactly why the assumptions behind the figures matter so much: they anchor the entire process. If a figure is too low, or built on guesses about zoning that haven't been tested, then the whole disposal is anchored to a number that can't be trusted.

Third, some increase between 2024 and 2026 is to be expected: the development concept firmed up over that period, the property market moved, and the City has stated that the second figure covers a larger area of land. But none of those factors resolves the core problem. Both are desktop valuations produced before the environmental, heritage and rezoning determinations that decide what the land may become. A desktop figure produced before those determinations cannot be a reliable fair market value for MATR Regulation 11, whatever direction the number moved.

Why this matters for you

This is not a technical quibble about a price tag. The valuation is a legal precondition for the entire disposal. If it was done at a moment when it was impossible to do reliably, then the City's authority to give this land away may be defective from the ground up.

And a disposal of public land is permanent. Once it transfers to a private owner, there is no mechanism to get it back. We would be making an irreversible decision on a number that nobody is allowed to see, produced at a time when it could not have been right. On 2 July 2026 the Constitutional Court, in the Tafelberg case (Adonisi [2026] ZACC 29), underlined that how, and when, the public is allowed to engage on the disposal of well-located public land is a constitutional question, not a formality. The process article explains why that ruling bears directly on this disposal.

The City should do this properly: finish the studies, establish what the land is genuinely permitted to become, value it honestly on that basis, and show the public the working. Until then, nobody can say this land is being valued fairly, because nobody, possibly not even the City, actually knows what a fair price is.

The comment period closes 7 August 2026. Anyone can object and register as an Interested and Affected Party. One email does it: state who you are, where you live, that you object, and that you want to be registered. Send it to Development.Mowbray@capetown.gov.za and mowbray@infinity.capetown.

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