What an African billionaire wants from their Joburg super home

LONDON — This is The Rational Perspective. I'm Alec Hogg. In this episode, we revisit Gatsby and find out how to sell a R100m Johannesburg Palace. In April last year, I conducted a sponsored interview with Rory O'Hagan, former private banker who switched to selling super homes for the estate agency, Chas Everitt. He showed me around his prize project at the time – a R100m+ palace on Johannesburg's Houghton Ridge – a palace they call Gatsby. I made a mental note to revisit the project and hopefully discover what kind of person would make such a massive personal investment in South Africa's commercial capital at such an uncertain time. This week, I duly caught up with Gatsby's creator – Steve Pellerade, whose company of the same name as the go to place when South Africa's super-rich are looking for new homes. He didn't drop any names in this business, discretion is absolute, but he did share enough to give us useful insight into the lifestyle of an African billionaire – that 0.1% of the 1%. We kick off the discussion by exploring what made him create the palace he named after the central character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's legendary novel. – Alec Hogg

We started with Gatsby over 10 years ago and we knew it was going to be an incredible super home and that it would appeal to a certain type of person, a regional magnet, a really large person. It entered the markets just shy of 18 months ago at quite a price and we had a great, great response. It's a unique property. It's quite iconic and we got an offer within, I would say within the first six weeks, which is great.

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