After all, the last quarter of every year seems to be traditionally a more testing time for commercial rent collection everywhere.

TPN's Commercial Rental Monitor, which covers office, retail and industrial rentals across South Africa, showed 81% of commercial tenants in good standing for this period.

Good standing refers to the grouping of tenants combined from the following categories: Paid on time (57%), paid in the grace period (8%) and paid late (15%).

Overall, late payments continue to pose a challenge nationally, as nearly 1 in 4 tenants paid rent after the due date, with the most negatively affected regions being the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal where more than 1 in 3 tenants are consistently late payers.