You know your numbers. Out of what?
Your sales, branches, policies or projects, measured against the true size of the market, place by place, across South Africa. Know your market, your real share of it, and where you are missing out.
Remember this conversation from school?
Them"Did you pass?"
You"I got 50."
Them"Out of what?"
You"200."
Them"Ouch."
Every business knows its own numbers cold. Sales by region. Branches by town. Policies, projects, call-outs. But those are all 50-out-of-something. Without the total, a map of your own numbers only tells you what you already know: you sell more where there is more business. It says nothing about how well you are doing, or where the untapped opportunity sits.
The total is the missing half of the fraction. We hold it.
Business happens in buildings.
Nearly all high-value South African businesses operate from commercial property: offices, warehouses, factories, shops. So the occupied commercial floor space in an area is a reliable measure of how much business activity that area holds. We measure that floor space, building by building, across South Africa, more than 64,000 properties, each one located precisely.
Just as important, we measure it inside properly defined areas. Totals are only comparable if the areas are drawn with no overlaps and no gaps, consistently, from the nine provinces down to individual commercial suburbs. We have spent years building and maintaining those definitions. That is what makes "your share of the market in this area" a number you can trust, rather than a guess.
Occupied commercial floor space, by province.
| Province | Occupied commercial floor space |
|---|---|
| Gauteng | 122M m² |
| KwaZulu-Natal | 36M m² |
| Western Cape | 22M m² |
| Eastern Cape | 8M m² |
| Free State | 5M m² |
| Mpumalanga | 2M m² |
| Limpopo | 2M m² |
| North West | 1M m² |
| Northern Cape | 1M m² |
One slice, top to bottom.
Shapes are schematic and not to scale; they shrink to show the area getting smaller as you drill down. They are not our boundary definitions.
| Layer | Area | Occupied commercial floor space |
|---|---|---|
| Province | Gauteng | 122M m² |
| City | Johannesburg | 76M m² |
| Municipality | Johannesburg municipality | 59M m² |
| Cluster | Sandton | 4.5M m² |
| Precinct | Sandton | 3M m² |
| Suburb | Sandown | 600K m² |
Every area in the country is handled like this. What we show here is a public sample. The detail for your markets is what we build for you, with you.
Five buyers, one question each.
Banks
"Where are we under-penetrated?" Your book, measured against the business activity in each area, shows exactly where you are under-weight, and by how much.
Insurers
"Is our distribution adequate?" Your broker and branch footprint, measured against where the insurable activity actually sits.
Energy businesses
"Which geographies do we service next?" Activity density by area tells you where the demand is before you commit the crews.
Manufacturers
"How big is our market, really, and what is our share?" A defensible market size, your true penetration, and the gap between them.
Any business with teams or branches
"Is that region's performance good?" Sales per unit of market, by area, turns 'Gauteng sells the most' into 'Gauteng is under-performing its market'.
One manufacturer's answer changed their strategy.
A major South African manufacturer, decades established, exporting worldwide, could not answer three basic questions: how big is our market, what is our share, and why are inferior imports eating it? Working from our data, we built a defensible, repeatable model of their market.
Their customers, it turned out, were also paying about a third more than they needed to, through intermediary mark-ups nobody could see. With the market sized and segmented, they could see which customers to pursue first, and why. Read the full story on our blog.
A market study, built on measured data.
- Market size and nature, for your category, by area.
- Market composition: who the buyers are, segmented.
- Buy triggers: why they purchase, and when.
- A financial model showing which inputs actually move the answer.
- Unit economics: what a customer is worth, and what winning one costs.
- Competitor breakdown.
The output is a decision, not a dashboard: how big, your share, where the gap is, and who to go after first. The study stands on its own. You can take it and run. (One practical note: overlaying your own numbers on ours needs your numbers to be trustworthy too. If they are not, see Fix my data.)
The public view proves the asset. The value is in your slice.
Public, on this page
The country view and one slice, dated, so you can see the asset is real and how deep it runs.
With you, under agreement
The finer areas, the splits by property type, the boundary definitions at work, and your own numbers overlaid on ours, scoped to your question. Prefer the data in your own systems? See Machine access.
Understanding tells you where. Ready to go after it?
Our Find me customers engine turns the strategy into named, qualified leads, exclusive to you. Same data, next gear.
Every market is different.
So we scope each study with you first: the geography, the depth, and the question it must answer. No off-the-shelf package.