While the business community - and the tourist industry in particular - continues to welcome and promote the 2010 World Cup hype, this is leading to a potential over-supply situation in the short term residential rental market, says Lanice Steward, MD of Anne Porter Knight Frank, the Claremont headquartered estate agency. APKF run active rental services in many of the areas likely to prove popular with the World Cup visitors to Cape Town.

Steward said that the hope of almost ludicrously high rentals over the World Cup period has led to many home and flat owners holding back from signing on long-term tenants, who on the Atlantic Seaboard and in the City Bowl are currently much in evidence.

“It really does concern me,” she said, “that many flat owners will find that they cannot get World Cup tenants - then when we are back to normality in July and August they will discover that the long term rental market is now flooded with new opportunities.”

Right now, Steward said, demand for long term rentals in the Green Point, Sea Point, Camps Bay and related areas is strong.

“We have had occasions where 20 to 30 applications have come in for an apartment and where people have been prepared to pay above the asking rate. I think, therefore, that it might well pay many landlords to sign up good tenants now rather than to hope for a quick-buck return in April, May and June, which could well not arise. Even if such opportunities do materialise the tenant is likely to be a totally unknown quantity to the landlord, and being from another country, it will be impossible to get reliable references from previous landlords, particularly as time will soon be so limited.”

Article by: www.anneporter.co.za