BLEND PROPERTY GROUP: Midpoint Emerges as the Next SA Business Address
Between Johannesburg and Pretoria, along the busy N1, Midpoint is emerging as a premier hub for business in South Africa. Developed by Blend Property Group, the area is home to industrial, commercial, logistics, and lifestyle space. Set for completion in 2027, this project is breathing new life into a region that is perfectly placed to help companies big and small to be truly successful with everything they need to thrive.
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Interview with Mark Corbishley, Chief Executive
In 2021, Enterprise Africa found Blend Property Group at the peak of its push to launch The Bank, the Rosebank project that would set the tone for everything that followed. The company had purchased an old 4500m2 FNB building and transformed it into one of the regions premier mixed-use developments.
“We kept the existing four-storey structure and added eight new storeys. We reinforced the foundations and the basement and the columns, and we took it up to 15,000m2. We added a hotel, some commercial space, and retail, and we like to think it was a perfect demonstration of what we like to do. It turned out really well and we sold to Kasada – a Qatar-backed hospitality fund,” says Chief Executive Mark Corbishley.
The company behind it is deliberately compact. “We have three offices – Cape Town, Bryanston, and Midrand – and we have around 40 people across all three offices. We were established in 2006. We are a privately held company with six partners that own the business and I am the only executive shareholder,” says Corbishley.
Its niche is the property that everyone else has given up on, buying mismanaged, underperforming, underwhelming office and industrial assets in good locations and overhauling to gain improved returns. “We typically like to invest in assets that already have some income because that helps us to service debt while enhancing and adding value. The majority are brownfield developments where we take existing assets and do extensive work,” he adds.
That appetite meets a market short of quality space. Industry data shows warehouse vacancies sitting low and industrial property standing as the strongest of the three major commercial sectors, yet too few well-located buildings ever reach the market, and most of those are let before the builders finish. “We are opportunists. We will look wherever there is an opportunity. We have a good broker network who know what we are looking for. Right now, we favour sites with scale and the Midpoint development has taught us that we should do big things where every decision is worth our time. Ultimately, a R20 million project has as much headache as a R2 billion project,” says Corbishley.
THINKING BIGGER
Scale is easy to want and hard to find. Non-residential building completions across the country are running almost 30% below their 2018 level, so new supply is scarce. “We are finding that it is harder to find bigger opportunities because those bigger assets are not typically mismanaged. It is much easier to find a R20 million mismanaged office block than a R2 billion precinct,” says Corbishley, adding that the time it takes to develop a greenfield project – with planning permissions, community arrangements, construction costs etc – make the rental numbers hard to achieve.
Blend answers by staying lean against its competition which is typically made up of much larger organisations, many of which are not dedicated property developers. “We have a good balance sheet behind us, and we have access to capital. We are very nimble, very entrepreneurial and very hands on. The space that we play in is made up of REITs and pension funds who manage billions of Rand of assets. It is difficult for them to be hands on at each site whereas Blend focuses on a small number of projects and that focus allows us to generate far greater margin,” says Corbishley.
The ability of Blend to be detail-focused, he says, shows in the end product. “We are always interrogating decisions and every value add. It’s something that we are challenged with because we want to scale but we don’t want to lose that hands on approach. We don’t want to drive volume and gain vanilla returns. Our advantage is that we are agile and we have excellent relationships with builders and professional teams.”
Current work is spread across Johannesburg, with three smaller projects running alongside the company’s headline development. South of Melrose Arch, an old block beside the M1 is becoming a self-storage building with an unexpected bonus. “First is an old block on the M1 where we are putting in 5000m2 of self-storage for our inhouse brand STOR24, and we are installing an LED wrap – one of the biggest in Johannesburg when finished. We aim to finish that by October 2027. The LED advertising element is much more lucrative than we thought and is good for us as we don’t need windows for self-storage so we are not compromised,” says Corbishley.
In Rosebank, a former bank headquarters at 160 Jan Smuts is being reborn as Rosewell, a wellness-led development anchored by Workshop17 and targeted for completion in September 2027. “It is an awkward building with big light wells and internal atriums which have not been done well. However, it has incredible bones with six levels of basement, lots of light, five-meter ceilings on the ground floor, and lots of open space,” says Corbishley.
BUILDING MIDPOINT
Midpoint is the company’s flagship and will become the jewel in Blend’s Johannesburg crown when fully complete. Assembled quietly over more than a decade from three large business parks, the precinct covers more than 440,000m2 on the N1 between Johannesburg and Pretoria, just past the internationally recognised Waterfall development. “We acquired Midrand Business Park around 12 years ago with 80,000m2 on which there was 12,000m2 of quasi workshop office space. It had a 35,000m2 piece of ground which we also purchased, and it sat vacant for six years. Four years ago, we developed 18,000m2 of high spec warehousing on risk. The take-up was better than expected and we let it all before completion,” details Corbishley.
Success of that kind fuelled further ambition and reinforced the Blend idea that premium space in Gauteng is in-demand. “Off the back of that, we enquired about the property to north and acquired Growthpoint Business Park, 250,000m2 with 67,000m2 of existing GLA on it. We joined the two together and we are now in the process of extending the Avroy Shlain warehouse by 2300m2, extending the Fresenius Kabi warehouse by 700m2, we have upgraded an old warehouse with first-class office facilities and let that to First Distribution Technology,” says Corbishley.
Across the highway, the former Siemens campus gives the precinct its technology side. “A year after we acquired Midrand, the Siemens head office came to the market. It was 100,000m2 with 23,000m2 office. It was a beautiful office space with double glazing, raised flooring and all of the touches you’d expect from an organisation of that size. We completed a sale and leaseback arrangement with Siemens taking around 25% of the space and a range of tech-focused tenants taking up the balance,” says Corbishley.
Position matters as much as product, and Midpoint’s 1.4 km of N1 frontage is some of the most visible property between the two cities. “It’s right on the N1 highway with 300,000 cars a day,” says Corbishley. “We want to take advantage of that to put Midpoint on the map. We are working on branding and hope to install Midpoint totems along the roadside with branding atop taller buildings too.” Soon, a journey north along the N1 Ben Schoeman Freeway will be lit turquoise with the Midpoint hue, welcoming commuters to a premier new business destination.
The branding is the start of a larger identity project. “We are trying to create the precinct of Midpoint that is the natural next step when you go past Waterfall. East of the highway is Midpoint, and west of the highway – on the old Siemens site – will be Midpoint Tech. We will enhance each building, changing facades, updating architecture, and bringing it all under one brand with a charcoal and vanilla colour scheme that has been developed for us,” Corbishley explains.
LIFE ON SITE
The Amenity Hub, built inside a former data centre, is where the change is easiest to see. FOND, an all-day eatery with its own coffee roastery, anchors it, with rooftop padel courts, a high-end gym, car wash and a crèche close by. “The amenity hub has been a game changer,” boasts Corbishley. “It’s very unusual for an industrial hub to have such a high-quality gym and other facilities. When we meet clients in the restaurant and then show them the space that is already working, it is super impressive and has been well worth the spend. We will also be putting in a five-kilometre running, walking, and cycling track that meanders through the site, across the dam, and under the highway. It will significantly enhance the offering for our tenants and our potential tenants.”
With more than 70 businesses now on site, security is treated as part of the underpinning infrastructure rather than an expensive extra. “There is a big tech-drive and we have spent a lot of money on AI cameras throughout the park. We have double booms and an onsite control room with an electric fleet of patrol cars, and three guardhouses across access into the site,” says Corbishley.
Rising utility bills and the service delivery pressures facing Gauteng have turned self-reliance into a selling point and Corbishley highlights a recent R50 million project bringing solar power and battery storage to Midpoint as particularly prominent, “We use these to arbitrage the energy tariffs. During peak hours in the morning and afternoon, we run off solar and batteries while the electricity is expensive. We have 6.0 MVA capacity on the park, and we currently only use 2.6. For water, we have multiple boreholes, and filtration and storage systems so that we can go for weeks if there is an interruption with municipal water supply,” he says. An application has also been made for an on-site fuel station to serve the logistics tenants.
The fact remains that quality, well-serviced property is in short supply across Gauteng, and the businesses that need it are often left waiting for a building that may never come. A precinct that offers power, water, security and amenity behind one set of gates answers that need directly, and the timetable is close. “We hope to be complete with the major works by the second or third quarter of 2027,” closes Corbishley.