The vacancy schedule, read properly

Ask where commercial vacancies are listed and most people will say Property24. That answer is not wrong — it is just late. By the time an empty floor reaches a portal it has already travelled a long way: the landlord recorded it, a broker took it on, a CRM syndicated it, and a listing feed pushed it out, usually on a daily cycle. The document at the start of that chain is called a vacancy schedule, and it is where the freshest vacancy information in the market actually sits.

A vacancy schedule is the periodic list a commercial, retail or industrial landlord circulates to brokers, showing every vacant unit in its portfolio — the building, the floor, the size in square metres, the asking rental, and when the space becomes available. Landlords issue them so brokers can prospect and match tenants; brokers transact against them under each landlord's mandate terms, which set out what earns the commission. Most of these documents are never advertised anywhere. They just arrive, monthly-ish, in broker inboxes — though a handful of landlords, as you'll see below, publish theirs in the open.

What one actually looks like

Spear REIT — a listed fund whose portfolio sits entirely in the Western Cape — publishes its schedule openly, which makes it a useful specimen. The April 2026 edition lists 49 vacant units totalling about 19 474 m², from a 62 m² office on the 9th floor at 2 Long Street (one of two vacant units on that floor) to a 1 500 m² warehouse unit at Consani Industrial Park, with gross asking rentals running from R67.25 to R280.00 per square metre. A few rows, verbatim in structure:

The columns are the vocabulary of the trade, and they repay a careful read.

Net rental vs gross rental. The net figure is the landlord's rent for the space itself. Add rates, any City Improvement District (CID) levy and other levies, and you get the gross rental on the schedule. On that 62 m² unit: R160.28 net becomes R185.00 gross once R20.59 in rates and a R4.13 CID levy are added. Note what gross still leaves out — VAT, utilities, parking, and any operating-cost recoveries the lease adds later. The schedule's number is the start of the arithmetic, not the end of it.

Available. "Immediately" means what it says. A date means a sitting tenant is leaving. "By arrangement" means phone the leasing team.

Under offer. Someone got there first, and the deal may still fall through. Worth watching, not worth planning around.

TIA — tenant installation allowance. The landlord's contribution to fitting out the space. Not always on the schedule, always worth asking about.

Where to find them

Distribution is the odd part of this market. There is no central register; each landlord decides how widely its schedule travels. In practice the Western Cape sources fall into three tiers.

Published openly, on the landlord's own site. Spear REIT posts a dated PDF monthly. Texton, Ingenuity (Western Cape-focused), Spire and Daleglen keep vacancy-schedule pages — all linked in the sources below. These cost nothing and come straight from the source.

Behind a broker registration. Growthpoint's Broker Hub gives registered brokers schedules and incentives; most large funds run some version of this, or simply email their schedule to a broker list. The way in is unglamorous: contact the leasing team and ask to be added.

Aggregated, for a fee. vacancyPro consolidates landlord schedules for the Western Cape, Gauteng and KZN into a searchable platform. Gmaven says it ingests schedules from over two hundred funds and managers, and sells the result as data. Both are paid services. If your business runs on this information, one of these is the honest shortcut.

One tier deliberately missing from that list: the portals. They carry commercial stock, but as a downstream mirror of broker systems — the schedule had the vacancy first. For vacancy rates rather than listings, SAPOA's quarterly Office Vacancy Survey breaks Cape Town out to node level; in the first quarter of 2026 it put the city's office vacancy at 6.0% against a national 12.6% — the strongest major market in the country.

What a schedule will not tell you

A schedule is a snapshot, taken by one landlord, of one portfolio, at one moment — and the formats vary widely between landlords: different columns, different rental bases, different file types. Between editions, space is let and space falls vacant without notice: comparing Spear's February and April 2026 editions, 13 units appeared and 15 disappeared in eight weeks. The rental shown is also an asking price — what space actually lets for is a different number, and the schedule keeps that to itself. So are the annual escalation, the minimum lease term and the TIA on offer: the figures that decide what occupation really costs live in the lease negotiation, not the schedule.

Still — for knowing what is empty, where, at what asking price, nothing else is closer to the source. The portals will catch up in their own time. The schedule already knows.

Where findproperly fits

We don't list vacancies, and this isn't a pitch that we do. But a schedule only tells you a unit is empty — not who owns the building, when it last changed hands, or what comparable properties nearby actually fetched. That's the half we do: the deeds-office side of the same address, pulled when you need it. When a schedule points you at a building worth a closer look, that's where to check the bones of it.