The industrial boom is helping bring back into play foundering industrial estates.

In Cape Town, a lack of developable land, soaring industrial prices and a strong dose of active management have helped revive the 68 ha Capricorn business estate in Muizenberg, a development launched in the 1990s as a hub for offshore technology companies but which never really got off the ground.

"The model was based on a US concept that didn't take off here," says Lindiwe Mavuso, communications head at Wesgro, the Western Cape trade and promotion agency.

Capricorn is controlled by Investec (62%) and the Rabie group was brought in as asset and property manager about a year ago.

Thirty sites have been sold in the past six months, almost entirely to owner-occupiers, says new asset manager Wendy Hartshorne.

Cash Crusaders has moved into the park, as has print technology company Pyrotech.

Forecasts show that 41 000 m² will be built in 2005.

"That's about R120m of new investment," says Hartshorne. "There's no doubt that the timing is right for Capricorn."

But not everyone agrees that the development will succeed a second time around. "The location was wrong, wrong, wrong," says property economist Erwin Rode. "For a science park, it was just too far from the city."

About a 20-minute drive south from the city, the estate is further from Cape Town than industrial nodes such as Salt River or Maitland.

Hartshorne retorts that location is relative and that peripheral industrial nodes in the north are doing fine." The northern nodes are as far from the city as Capricorn."

Financial Mail