Exemplar REITail Limited has listed on the JSE. The company was created from the core of McCormick Property Development (MPD) – a company with over 35 years of experience in the development and management of rural retail centres.

Exemplar REITail will focus entirely on the ownership and management of township and rural retail, with no development arm within the company, thus removing development risk for investors.

CEO of Exemplar REITail, Jason McCormick, says they will continue to work alongside MPD and will have first right of refusal for all their developments going forward, subject to approval from the Investment Committee.

The MPD development pipeline currently stands at over half a million square metres of retail potential (at 2017 market demand estimates), with an average size of over 20 000sqm per development.

Exemplar has listed with a value of just over R5.5 billion and a market capitalisation of just over R3 billion. The fund has 20 retail properties and three further shopping centres, currently under construction, that will be added to the portfolio once completed within the next 2 years.

“We are the only fund in South Africa focused purely on emerging market retail and are unique in that every one of the 20 operational properties in the fund were developed by MPD. The same team that has managed them since their respective openings will still continue to do so.” says McCormick.

Having pioneered the development and management of retail in these areas over 35 years ago and with the Exemplar management team having a combined 238 years of employment at MPD at the time of being internalised into Exemplar, it is safe to say that the team’s experience in this niche of the retail market is unprecedented.

“This level of experience in the industry plus a historical understanding of our assets and the market within which we operate should produce great comfort to investors looking for new opportunities in the REIT space,” concludes McCormick.

Exemplar’s board includes John McCormick, Jason McCormick and Duncan Church as executive directors. Industry stalwart and ex head of Nedbank CIB, Frank Berkeley is the non-executive chairman and Greg Azzopardi, Peter Katzenellenbogen and Phatudi Maponya make up the non-executive directors.