Ask what a suburb has done over the last decade and you will usually get one number back. It is almost always the freehold number, because freehold is what most suburbs are mostly made of — and because it is the figure that gets quoted.
The trouble is that a suburb is not one market. It is at least two, sitting on the same streets, moving at different speeds. Here is what that looks like across the five West Rand suburbs covered by our quarterly reports.
Ten-year growth, split by tenure type
| Suburb | Freehold growth | Sectional growth | Freehold share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monument | +40% | — | 68.5% |
| Kenmare | +32% | +18% | 74.0% |
| Noordheuwel | +27% | — | 63.1% |
| Rant en Dal | +25% | — | 72.2% |
| Chancliff Ridge | +19% | +38% | 76.7% estate-based |
Look at the top and bottom rows. On freehold alone, Monument grew more than twice as fast as Chancliff Ridge. If that were the whole story, you would conclude Chancliff Ridge had been the weakest performer of the five.
But Chancliff Ridge's sectional title segment grew +38% over the same ten years — the second-strongest growth figure on the whole table, and double what its own freehold stock managed.
Same suburb, same decade, same deeds office. Freehold +19%, sectional +38%. Whichever number you were shown would have told you something true and something incomplete.
Kenmare runs the other way
Kenmare inverts the pattern. Its freehold segment grew +32% while sectional managed +18% — freehold nearly doubling the sectional rate.
That is not a contradiction. It is what you would expect from the composition of each suburb. Kenmare is 74% freehold: standalone houses are the main event, they set the benchmark, and sectional units are priced in relation to them. Chancliff Ridge is 76.7% estate-based, where sectional schemes are a core part of what the suburb offers rather than an afterthought on its edges.
Put simply: in each suburb, the segment that defines the place is not automatically the segment that grows fastest. Sometimes the smaller segment is the one with room to move.
What this means if you are selling
- Check which number you are being shown. If an agent quotes you a suburb's ten-year growth, ask whether it is freehold, sectional, or a blend. The answer changes the figure materially.
- A blended suburb average is the least useful number of the three. It describes a property that does not exist — a weighted average of two different markets.
- Your comparables must match your tenure type. A sectional unit in Chancliff Ridge compared against freehold sales in the same suburb will be mispriced, in whichever direction the gap happens to run that year.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the difference between reading one number and reading the data underneath it — which is the entire reason we publish the full quarterly report for each suburb rather than a headline percentage.