About

NICE TO MEET YOU

I'm Retha van Rooyen

I started my career in management consulting at Accenture. Big teams, multi million Rand budgets, delivery centres on different continents. I was good at it. But somewhere between the spreadsheets and the boardrooms, I fell in love with property. Not the theory of it, the bricks, the lease, the moment a building stops being a cost and starts building someone's future.

I began quietly, with a small portfolio of single family homes. Then in 2016, I walked away from consulting to do this full time. Over the next two years I bought multi family properties and developed a small townhouse complex. I made mistakes. I learned faster because of them.

What I Actually Do

NSFAS accreditation is where I've built the deepest expertise in this business: the grading system, the compliance gates, the payment cycle timing that catches landlords off guard every year. I've sat on sector accreditation discussions, and I wrote the book on it, literally, because most landlords learn these lessons the expensive way, after the fact.

Today, My Student House manages 2,000+ students across 51 properties in Cape Town, Potchefstroom, Bloemfontein, Gqeberha, Johannesburg, and Vanderbijlpark. We started with a handful of beds. Our five year goal is 10,000 students under management.

None of that matters if it doesn't translate into something useful for you. So here's what I actually do for the two kinds of people who end up on this site.

If you're a landlord sitting on student property that isn't performing, or thinking about buying your first one, I want to have the conversation about where the real risk sits, before you find out the expensive way.

If you're an investor or aspiring operator who wants to learn this business properly rather than guess your way through it, that's what the courses, the toolkit, and the book are for. I wrote Creating Wealth with Student Accommodation in South Africa because this sector needs more informed investors, not more uninformed ones.

Either way, welcome. Let's talk about what you're actually trying to build.

Why I Do It

I'm protective of both sides of every transaction I manage: the landlord's cash flow, and the student's experience. A lot of this sector only talks about landlord returns. I don't think that's the whole job.

Most landlords who enter student accommodation don't realise what they're walking into until they're already in trouble, usually at accreditation stage. I built My Student House to close that gap, and to make sure the students living in these properties are actually being looked after too.

Manage every property as though your records could be reviewed tomorrow. That's not a slogan. It's how I run this business.