CHAS EVERITT INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY GROUP: Increasingly Global, Sustainably South African
Chas Everitt International Property Group is a franchise real estate operation that is growing its global presence with recent investments into various new markets. But what clients love, and what is unlocking expansion, is the company’s commitment to family values and ethical delivery – a ethos that has been embedded in its DNA since establishment in South Africa more than 40 years ago.
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Interview with Barry Davies, Director
Berry Everitt told Enterprise Africa in 2021 that Chas Everitt International Property Group was ahead of the curve, thriving because it had invested early, adapted quickly and refused to let a turbulent market dictate its fortunes. Five years later, the curve has shifted again. South Africa’s property market is no longer reacting to pandemic disruption but to a new era of semigration, luxury demand, regional imbalance and growing international investor appetite. Through all of it, Chas Everitt has not merely held position – it has accelerated.
Now, Director Barry Davies says the business is operating in a market transformed by both economics and buyer behaviour and still posting growth that many competitors would envy. “Revenue has been very good in the past year,” he says. “The property market has been solid and the Western Cape market has exploded, dragging along the rest of the country. The result is that we are 20% up on last year. We are also very ambitious and confident that we can take that growth forward through 2026.”
That confidence is considered against market signals. Analysts across South Africa’s real estate sector have pointed to a sharp rebound in residential activity over the past 12 months, but with one crucial caveat: the gains have not been evenly spread. Coastal provinces, lifestyle towns and premium Cape markets have surged, while inland affordability remains the volume driver. It is this unevenness that has favoured operators with national scale and local intelligence, and few have the footprint to read those micro-markets as effectively as Chas Everitt.
“We have 140 outlets around the country, and Berry and I are the two directors of the franchise holding company. Our key services include residential sales and letting, traditional estate agency work, and we have an agricultural and commercial arm as well. While the business is a franchise operation, we are essentially an estate agency group,” Davies details.
From Johannesburg and Pretoria to Cape Town’s high-demand lifestyle belt, from agricultural transactions to commercial mandates, the company’s reach now extends beyond the traditional suburban sales formula that defines so much of the industry. Founded in 1980 and built into one of South Africa’s most recognisable property brands, the group’s franchise model has matured into something broader: a nationwide network supported by financial, legal, technological and international referral systems that make it increasingly difficult to classify as simply another estate agency.
MARKET SHIFT
Davies is clear that the story of the past five years has been one of geographic rebalancing. “The industry has changed massively and in just the past five years the growth in the Western Cape has been phenomenal. Property prices have tripled, and growth across the rest of the country has been slower. South Africa is not simply one macro market but several smaller micro markets within.”
That observation has become one of the defining truths of South African real estate in 2026. Cape Town remains under sustained pressure from semigration buyers, retirees, digital professionals and foreign capital, while lifestyle towns in the Winelands and along the coast are drawing investors who increasingly value security, scenery and service infrastructure over proximity to traditional commercial hubs. Smaller Western Cape towns have emerged as investment hotspots, and luxury homes in heritage areas are seeing fierce international competition.
Chas Everitt has been positioned inside that trend, but crucially without abandoning the inland markets that continue to generate transactional volume. “Five years ago, more than 70% of our business would have been done between the Western Cape and Gauteng. Of that, 70% would be Gauteng and 30% Cape Town. Now, it is 50/50,” explains Davies.
That single statistic says much about how quickly the company has adapted. Davies notes that Gauteng still delivers substantial unit sales, but the value growth has shifted west. “We do a lot more unit sales in Gauteng but the average price is a lot lower and the prices in the Western Cape have skyrocketed in both rental and sales.”
The company is leaning into that premium movement like never before. “A lot of our growth has come from the top end, luxury side of the market, and keeping that as a focus is important,” says Davies. Yet Chas Everitt’s expansion strategy remains notably cautious in an industry where aggressive franchising can often become a numbers game detached from long-term sustainability. “A lot of our business growth comes through conversion of existing operations rather than start up. It’s a very tough industry to get into from the beginning and it is easy to take people’s money as a franchise and then see them fail but that is against our mantra,” he adds.
VALUES FIRST
That mantra is an underpinning that has strengthened Chas Everitt for many decades. Growth matters, but not at any cost. Size matters, but only if the business underneath is culturally coherent.
“We are family values-based business, and we try as hard as possible to not be too corporate. We want companies we work with to align with that. Some of the biggest partners we have are not always the biggest in the country, and we are deliberate about that,” says Davies.
This explains Chas Everitt’s longevity and sustainability. In a fragmented industry flooded with independent agents, digital listing platforms and AI-assisted customer interfaces, the company continues to place unusual emphasis on relationship continuity. Davies points not to software first, but to attorneys who have remained in partnership for three decades, to Betterhome relationships that have stretched 25 years, and to a franchise promise established in 2003 that benefits negotiated at group level would be passed directly to operators on the ground.
“It has to be a good fit, and we are all about creating benefits for the franchisee. If it works for the franchisor and not the franchisee, then it’s probably not right for us.”
That thinking extends to recruitment, where technical ability alone is no longer enough. “We have to bring people into the business who are the right fit for us. For example, we recently pursued an agent for six months, but when it got to the interview stage we had to say that the fit wasn’t right,” he recalls.
The insistence on cultural alignment may sound old fashioned in a market obsessed with transaction speed, but it underpins what Davies believes is Chas Everitt’s most defensible competitive edge. “We base a lot on what we do around building lasting relationships with clients over decades, and even generations. We have many client families where we are now working with a third generation.”
In real estate, where trust can evaporate with a single mishandled phone call, that kind of intergenerational loyalty is not won through advertising spend. It is earned through consistency, ethics and an almost stubborn refusal to commoditise the customer relationship. As Davies puts it: “Our founder Charles Everitt always used to say, ‘you only have one reputation and you have to look after it very carefully.”
BEYOND BORDERS
The company’s reputation is so strong that exporting it is part of the growth plan.
“We are busy expanding our footprint outside of South Africa. We opened a new operation in Zimbabwe last year, and we are opening in Mauritius and Namibia. We opened in Dubai very recently, and we are looking at further international expansion,” says Davies.
For a company that in 2021 was embracing digital readiness and domestic resilience, this is a notable next chapter, using domestic credibility as a springboard into cross-border growth.
Its long-standing affiliation with Leading Real Estate Companies of the World (LeadingRE) gives the group access to referral pipelines, global buyer networks and commercial property partnerships that are becoming increasingly valuable as foreign investors scan South Africa’s premium nodes. Davies sees particular opportunity in this intersection between international capital and Cape-based commercial demand. “There is a lot of interest in commercial property in the Cape from international markets and so we have earmarked that part of the business for growth this year.”
The networking effort behind that ambition is already visible, from participation in LeadingRE conferences and events around the world to forthcoming technology events in the UK, but the bigger point is that Chas Everitt’s growth no longer depends solely on the domestic sales cycle. It is now building multiple corridors of momentum – luxury, commercial, neighbouring-country expansion and global referral business.
In a climate where geopolitical tension and interest rate uncertainty continue to cast shadows over investment sentiment, Chas Everitt remains strikingly certain of its direction. The company that once won by being ahead of the curve is now winning by understanding that the curve never stops moving. And as Barry Davies makes clear, standing still has never been part of the family culture.