The man who dreamt up Century City

Every property professional in Cape Town seems to have heard a version of the Martin Wragge story, usually never the full picture. He’s a colourful character whom I have heard a lot about over my time spent in real estate.

Wragge is a South African property developer and executive. His kaleidoscope of a career includes developing the start of what we know today as Century City and Canal Walk Shopping Centre; Africa’s first amusement park, Ratanga Junction; and Tygervalley Shopping Centre, which he developed over a decade before Canal Walk.

He has also written and produced motion pictures, including The Last Warrior, Survivor, A Matter of Principle, Death Rattle, Death of a Snowman and Ratanga’s Fire & the Galopata Machine.

Wragge’s speciality is large-scale mixed-use developments. By his company’s count, he has developed more than three million square metres of commercial, industrial, residential, leisure and retail space in South Africa as well as a further two million square metres in China.

Yet search his name or ask around and there’s little to learn about the man who has done some remarkable work in the real estate world.

In the mid-1990s, the land that would become Century City belonged to a listed company, Ilco Homes, which had been trying to build affordable housing on the site under the name Summer Greens.

It didn’t work. Ilco owed Christo Wiese’s Boland Bank about R80 million and was losing roughly R1m a month. The banks needed someone to rescue the project. They turned to Monex, the Cape Town development company Wragge headed.

What he inherited was, in his own words via a Finweek interview, “basically a swampland, underwater and with no access to the N1”. Wragge’s insight was that the land could be saved only by rezoning it from residential to mixed-use. The infrastructure the site needed could never be paid for by housing alone.

“We knew that if we failed to get the land rezoned, we were going to go down the toilet. No cigar,” he said.

He got the rezoning: 680 000m2 of commercial bulk, then believed to be the largest single rezoning approved in South Africa. Sod-turning began in 1997.

People thought Wragge had lost the plot. The project looked too ambitious for the time. The first years were slow and a recession made corporate buy-in almost impossible. Then PwC, Vodacom and the Louis Group announced new offices in Century City, with the South African Police Service, Unisys and Business Connexion following.

Many people predicted that Canal Walk would be a disaster. The enormous plans included a 252 hectare precinct intended to hold 3 500 houses, 1 500 flats, 700 000m2 of office space, Canal Walk with a gross lettable area of around 140 000m2 and a 40ha amusement park called Ratanga Junction.

Getting retailers on board for the mall was, in Wragge’s own words, “the nut to crack — the key success factor to the whole development”.