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

A plain-English explanation of the valuation problem at the centre of the King David Mowbray disposal

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?

What the City's number is

The City values the 42.8 hectares earmarked for disposal at R171 million, based on a desktop valuation done in March 2024. That figure comes from the City's own Information Pack.

Here is one way to feel what R171 million means. The houses on Links Drive sit right on the edge of the golf course. They sell for at least R6 million each. The City has valued the entire 42.8 hectares, roughly 428,000 square metres of land, at R171 million: the price of about 28 of the homes that border it. Look wider and the point only sharpens. A typical family home elsewhere in Pinelands goes for R3.5 to R4.6 million, which puts the whole course at the price of roughly 40 ordinary houses.

Per square metre it tells the same story. R171 million across 42.8 hectares works out to roughly R400 per square metre. Established residential land in Pinelands, once you strip out the value of the house standing on it, sits closer to R1,700 to R2,300 per square metre. The City is valuing this land at something like a quarter to a fifth of what the serviced residential land around it is worth.

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 valued the land in March 2024, not one of those studies had been done. 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 that date it was not 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.

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 housing organisation Ndifuna Ukwazi later showed that the property had been advertised with 17,500 square metres of development bulk when the true figure was around 46,000 square metres. On the correct figure, a fair market value was closer to R227 million — which would mean the public lost roughly R140 million. The discrepancy was serious enough that the then Mayor called for a forensic investigation in 2018.

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 can't even 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 being kept from 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.

Being fair to the City

Two 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, R171 million is the reference valuation, 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 R171 million matter so much: that figure anchors the entire process. If it 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.

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.

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 6 July 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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