So the people living here in Centurion, do any of you live outside of an estate and those who do, what has your experience been with crime?
We have to get a new house as this 3 bedroom is simply too small with the twins and with player number 3 on the way, this is just getting more desperate.
So the new house must be spacious, at least 4 bedrooms with an office and must have a relatively decent sized yard. They exist in estates, but the prices and/or levies are insane.
So basically I’m left with the choice of getting something small and extremely secure in an estate or a palace outside of an estate for the same price. I’ve pretty much moved directly into an estate when I moved to the city so I have no experience of how crime and things are outside.
Centurion isn’t all that safe anymore, unfortunately. Even though we don’t live there anymore, we’re still on many community groups listing constant break-ins, murders, hi-jackings and other serious crimes. I wouldn’t recommend staying in an unsecured suburb, unfortunately.
I have first-hand and second-hand experience with various house / complex / estate living arrangements in Centurion.
Not going to give away too many specifics about how I know these things on a public platform, but here are the basics:
25 years in free-hold house in Lyttelton, three break-ins: (1) In the first, thieves only got a DVD player before seemingly getting scared off; (2) Second, thieves took laptop(s), screens, and any phones they could lay hands on; (3) Most recently thieves broke in and took laptops and screens. They were going for phones or something in rooms when they woke the only man in the house. He sat upright in bed and he asked “Can I help you?”. Thieves bugged out. No-one was attacked or injured in any of the above cases.
Dorinkloof: Free-hold house, within days of moving in got hit by thieves who took the TV and PCs. No-one was attacked, everyone unharmed. No further incidents in the years since, but there are Rottweilers on the property.
Various townhouse / sectional title complexes: No break-ins or other incidents after many years of owning / living there, besides one spate of cars getting stolen. Suspect syndicate had taken up residence and had a gate remote, so they could let themselves in and out. There were also some petty thefts during this time when laptops got stolen out of people’s unlocked cars.
Had one incident where a man was followed home from the bank, got tailgated, and criminals wanted to rob the cash he had drawn for payroll. Security guard confronted criminals and had gun pointed at them. Mercifully no shots, no-one harmed.
Free-hold complex next door to where we currently live: Several cars stolen from the property. Suspect syndicate had taken up residence and could get in and out easily, similar to sectional title situation above. They had a lot more cars stolen, though.
Recommendation: Unless you are going to live in a village like Irene, if you choose to buy free hold anywhere (including Centurion) my recommendation is to get beefy security. CCTV, electric fencing, alarm, the works. It sucks to turn your home into a prison, but those are the times we live in. I’m sure New Yorkers in the '90s felt the same.
@Viper, it’s such a difficult one. We are also looking to move to a bigger place in around a year’s time. As soon as you look at estates and complexes the prices are so high for 4 bedroom places. Normal houses are so much cheaper.
But it’s just too big a risk to buy a normal house. Space would be nice but in the end you want your family to be safe.
You can maybe look for a boomed off area though. It’s something I’ve been considering. Not sure how much it helps though. Don’t know if any of you know perhaps?
I’ve basically got two possible options thus far, both would be great it they work out. I’m sure there are others, but I haven’t really searched in detail.
The one is to build a decent house in my current estate. It is the biggest and safest yard in the estate, but the guy is a bit funny. I’ve contacted him a year ago to find out if he doesn’t maybe want to sell and now I’ve finally gotten a response, but talks are slow. He is willing to sell if I let him build a house for me. He is a developer himself (property, not software). I still have no idea of what kind of cost I’ll be looking at though.
The other option is the massive palace outside of the estate, but also close to our current area. We were going to sell our house just before the twins were born with the plan to buy something bigger outside an estate and then my wife chickened out when we found a buyer. Then she saw this house and was like, we’ll just secure the hell out of it or make a plan or something. So… we’ll go have a look at it tomorrow. This house is actually too big (like 4 times the square meter of our current 3 bedroom house), so we’ll have space… lots and lots of space… mostly because we won’t have enough stuff to fill all the space.
I think Centurion might even be more expensive than other areas, but I’m not keen on moving. From my current location, everything is less than 5min away, including Checkers, a mall, gym and squash club. I also like that it is nicely central between Pretoria and Jhb. If I visit clients, it is usually in Jhb, our friends live in Jhb and our church is in Sandton (which we’ll attend again one day when we’re done releasing new kids), so it is like having the benefit of being not too far from Jhb without actually living in Jhb.
I think Roodepoort is quite dangerous though so I wouldn’t even consider staying outside of an estate if we had lived there, so I can understand why you wouldn’t. I think I saw a report some years ago that said something about Roodepoort being the most dangerous area in Gauteng to live in or something. Not sure if that has changed.
There are a couple of boomed off areas in Centurion Central, nice places, but I haven’t seen any houses for sale in there though.
Thanks for the valuable feedback. I think we can actually secure a house quite well with outside beams and cctv, preventing them from getting too far before security arrives.
My bigger (or rather biggest, if not only) concern is mostly in the driveway. That is something that is very rare with estates and I think by far the biggest risk that I can’t control or really plan too much for.
Know of any incidents like that (and which areas)?
Damn… I haven’t actively thought about driveway hijackings for some time.
Not that I haven’t been cautious and observant when pulling into driveways, but I just realised that actively thinking about what I would do in a situation like that terrifies me.
It’s a reminder how much “unsafety” we just internalize as South Africans.
Anyway…
I honestly haven’t heard much about driveway hijackings in the Lyttelton/Dorinkloof/Die Hoewes/Highveld/Irene portions of Centurion. Searching on YouTube and news sites, they do clearly happen but they seem to be fairly isolated.
One incident I remember is from many, many years ago when a friend of mine pulled into the driveway of an estate to drop off his date. They had just gone for dinner and a movie or something. I can’t even remember if it was Eldo Glen or Eco Park. Hijackers emerged from the shadows and took their phones and the car. They were unharmed.
I guess another way to read that story is that driveway hijackings don’t only happen at free hold houses, but I guess it’s fair to say that a house is more vulnerable to it than an estate or complex might be.
