In more detail
The long version.
What the numbers actually say about commercial space in Cape Town, online retail, and how long the law makes you keep things.
Why storage is not just cheaper premises
The per-square-metre comparison does not work
It is tempting to compare storage to warehouse rent per square metre. Do it honestly and storage loses. Cape Town warehouse space ran roughly R85 to R95 per m² a month in the stronger industrial nodes in 2026, reaching about R135 in prime buildings. A Cape Storit pod holds six cubic metres on a floor area of about three square metres, at R750 a month — call it R250 per m². On that measure alone, warehouse space is the cheaper square metre.
Worth saying plainly: per square metre, storage costs more than a warehouse. It is the wrong comparison, but pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
What you actually cannot buy
The catch is that nobody leases you three square metres. Industrial space is let in units, and the smallest of them are far larger than the overflow most small businesses are trying to solve — on a lease measured in years, with a deposit, rates and a fit-out. You are not choosing between R90 and R250 per m². You are choosing between a few square metres by the month and a few hundred for three to five years.
The useful question is not what a square metre costs. It is how few of them you can get away with renting.
The Cape Town squeeze
There is very little slack in this market
SAPOA put Cape Town’s decentralised office vacancy at 2.7% in the second quarter of 2026 — the lowest of any metro, and below where it sat before the pandemic. Nationally the figure was 12.1%. Industrial vacancy in the well-located Cape Town nodes is tighter still.
What that means for a growing business
It means the unit next door is probably not available, and the bigger premises you would move to may not be either. Businesses in this market tend to solve growth by taking space somewhere else rather than by moving — which is precisely the shape of problem storage is good at.
Stock without a shop
Online retail is now a tenth of the market
World Wide Worx and Mastercard put South African online retail at about R159-billion in 2026, roughly 10% of total retail turnover, growing 22.5% against about 4% for retail as a whole. A decade ago it was under 1%.
The practical consequence is a large number of businesses holding real inventory without a shop to hold it in. A spare room works until it does not, and the point at which it stops working usually arrives in the middle of a good month.
How long you must keep records
Two Acts, two clocks
The Tax Administration Act requires records that support a return to be kept for five years, and the five years runs from the date the return was submitted — not from the date of the transaction. The Companies Act requires company accounting records and annual financial statements to be kept for seven years.
The practical rule
Where both apply, work to the longer one. Most accountants land on seven years as the safe default for anything financial. That is a meaningful volume of paper for a business that has been trading a while, and none of it needs to sit in the office.
This is a general summary, not legal or tax advice. Retention periods vary by document type and other Acts may apply to your industry — check with your accountant.
