The Carlton Centre officially turned 50 last year, but it’s aged as badly as fellow quinquagenarian Charlize Theron has bloomed.
From the outside, the concrete monolith might not look changed, but a peek inside tells a different story. Aside from the brightly lit, bustling shopping mall that serves the city centre and a skeleton Transnet crew, the building – once South Africa’s most storied hotel and office block – is empty, dusty and dark.
It is as emblematic of the city of Joburg’s decline as it is of Transnet’s financial fumbles over the past 20 years – including (another) aborted sale of the Carlton two years ago.
Completed in 1973 as a 50-storey office building, 600-room luxury hotel, and a ground-level department store, the building was initially 45% owned by Anglo American and SA Breweries, and 10% by UK bank Barclays before it pulled out of apartheid South Africa. It was bought by Transnet in 1999 (for R33m).
You may well ask why Transnet was in the business of high-rise real estate at all. It’s a good question, because the monopoly rail, port and pipeline operator happens to have a massively underperforming property division, too.
The unit made R1.5bn in revenue in 2024 – down 31% from 2023. Its expenses came to R1.3bn, meaning a skinny R246m profit.
At least it was marginally in the green; the overall Transnet enterprise made a loss of R1.9bn in the 2025 financial year – which is, in fact, a massive improvement from its R7.3bn loss the year before.
But Transnet has been conspicuously silent about its property division this year, producing no report on it and refusing to answer any questions from Currency about the division or the Carlton Centre itself.
The utility is happy to advertise the restoration of its new head offices at 96 Rissik Street, celebrating the preservation of this Edwardian heritage building. Experts wrinkle their noses at the placement, however, noting it will only worsen congestion problems around Park Station.
Buy today, regret forever
After putting the Carlton up for sale for R900m in 2023, Transnet took it off the market; it had received no promising offers. What the building is actually worth is a contentious issue in and of itself.
“The building’s value is really determined by what anyone would be willing to pay for it,” says Brian McKechnie, a heritage architect and current chair of the Rand Club.
The last person to put a number on 150 Commissioner Street was the late property doyen Gerald Leissner, who set the Carlton’s replacement cost at R1.5bn. This was back in 2007 ,when Transnet’s then CEO, Maria Ramos, went on a non-core asset selling spree, though she described the Carlton as “an important premium property”.
Cagey about figures, Ramos told News24’s Sikonathi Mantshantsha back then that “we want to get the best prices. We are not going to give buyers ideas about what they must pay.”
Then the global financial crisis erupted later that year, and that was that.
And what might a company even do with the building? As it stands, McKechnie says the retail section, which faces onto Joburg’s Commissioner Street is “the only part of the building that is used to maximum capacity”.
“Because there are so many people [in town] spending money, you still attract really good retailers to that area.”
While this section of the centre is still profitable and attractive, there is still the problem of 50,000m2 of office space alone to contend with.
“If you look at the state of the inner city now, the only real market that you have is affordable residential,” says McKechnie.
The hotel could be easily converted into housing, but the office tower is just not built to become anything other than offices. And, given that the Carlton hotel has spent 25 years in mothballs, any conversion would involve stripping the place from top to bottom. The entrance has even been bricked up, as if Transnet is trying to seal in an unruly monster it would prefer not to deal with.
Transnet has previously floated the idea of converting the office tower into a secondary functional office space. According to Stephen du Preez, founder of LocalAbode, an inner-city management company, Transnet still provides a third of all LocalAbode’s funding for the management and upkeep of the Marshalltown area.
The Transnet property division has “been working exceedingly hard to convince people to come back to the Carlton Centre”, says Du Preez. It has invested heavily in its rejuvenation and wishes to see it through, he believes.
If Transnet were to have any chance of selling it, Du Preez believes the Carlton would be parcelled up into separate pieces – the shopping centre, hotel and office tower.
As it stands, he thinks the building in its entirety is worth between R5,000/m2 and R6,000/m2, which would carry a price tag of roughly R400m.
Would anyone pay this? “I do think there would be buyers for it,” Du Preez argues. Companies that specialise in low-income residential housing may pay up given that the rental yield on inner-city properties can reach an impressive 10%.
McKechnie’s prognosis on the Carlton’s future is far gloomier. “It’s probably worth close to nothing, since the conversion cost on the housing would be so high. The replacement value is in the billions.”
And who has billions to spare for a part of Joburg that seems to be in a state of terminal decay?
For now, who knows what Transnet is thinking. The utility has been stubborn in its refusal to discuss its plans for the building – perhaps because it has none.
“Transnet has no business managing property,” says McKechnie. “It’s totally out of their area of expertise.”
With Transnet hardly excelling in its actual areas of knowhow, the Carlton may simply remain what it is: the marker of a Joburg now long gone.
Pictures: Brian McKechnie.
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