Housing in major cities all over the world is always in high demand.
People move in and out of the cities like the ebb and flow of ocean waves; their reasons for moving vary but most common is that of the cost of rent versus the living space.
The solution most times is that people share a living space to pay less on rent but what do people who crave their own space yet their pockets don’t quite reach it do? Luckily for them, there are such things as "nano" apartments.
A Joburg company, Live Easy, established seven years ago by Jeffrey Froom and James Huff, has taken on the challenge of providing, affordable city living in small apartments of about15-20square metres (sqm) to young professionals and those who require affordable housing.
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“Nano living is a concept that we coined about seven years ago when we started the business. It was formed out of seeing what was going on in terms of rental apartments in the Joburg CBD and around Joburg in general, where there were multiple families living in one apartment. In, say a 30 or 40sqm one-bedroom apartment, there might be six to eight people living in that environment,” says Huff.
Most people would pay R2,000-R3,000 in that type of shared environment but they still have to share a toilet and a kitchen. Other people might even be paying that amount to live in backrooms while commuting to work in the city.
“We just really reverse engineered it to say what could we provide, what could we bring to market, this is about seven years ago, at around R2,000 to R3,000 a month. And what we designed is what we’ve now termed a nano unit, a 15-18sqm self-contained bachelor apartment.”
The rentals now range from R2,500 up to R4,000, and they have a bathroom and small kitchenette.
“It’s an aspirational residential brand, it’s about transitioning people from undesirable living environments in both location and the environment itself into well located and well managed desirable locations with all the amenities, WiFi, hair salons, laundromats, gyms, creches and playgrounds for kids. We’ve termed it into almost like estate living for the lower LSM. That’s what nano living is about and that’s what Live Easy is about. Our catch phrase [is] 'Move in, Move up'.”
In the beginning Huff says, the challenge, like in all businesses, was raising the initial capital. The concept was fairly new when they started and they did quite a bit of explaining.
“But bit by bit we managed to gain a track record, so that was the initial breaking into getting the financiers on-board, to get them to understand the product, and to understand the end user."
Live Easy has properties in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Ekurhuleni, its first property was a converted warehouse in Kew.
Huff says there was a misconception that people who can only afford to pay R3,000 a month for rent might be difficult renters but he says this isn’t true.
“It’s quite the opposite, our tenant base is sophisticated, they are able to live normal lives, they want to pay their rentals, there is a stigma around this part of the rental market and we’ve proven that the stigma was incorrect.”
Huff says that there is a great demand for their units, they’ve managed to keep their buildings mostly full and they’ve seen an increase in queries due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We’ve seen a huge resilience in this product. Seven years ago when we started it wasn’t an asset class to speak of but certainly now what’s happened over the pandemic and we've seen the resilience of this product versus your more traditional real estate assets classes be it offices or retails, or some of the high-end residential, our vacancies have remained low and our collections have remained good and it’s showing a really good trend on this particular assets class and it’s an exciting space.”
Tenants sign an initial one-year lease. Huff says they even still have clients who started with them on their first property in Kew and have moved into their latest property in Rivonia. He says the amount of turnaround depends on the location.
Live Easy has 10 buildings, with about 2,000 units, so each building has roughly 250 units. To give you an idea of size in a traditional 30-40sqm apartment there would be a 100 to 120 units in a building.
“They’re a higher-dense environment, dense from South African standards but certainly from cities around the world, not an unusual dense in terms of the living environment.”
Huff says for now they’re concentrated on developing the business in Gauteng because they are very hands on.
They have a building in Randburg, which has 700 apartments; it used to be the old Sasol headquarters. Each apartment is roughly 20sqm and it is close to Randburg Square and the Randburg taxi rank.
“Randburg has become this wonderfully diverse residential node almost like overnight, in the last three years there has been about 2,000 apartments that have been developed by taking old offices and converting them into residentials. We account for about 700 of those and there’s a couple of other developers that have done that in the area.”
They’ve got residents covered from the R3,000-R4,000 mark with others providing accommodation for R5,000 upwards, creating a diverse rental space.
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