Thirty years ago, the land between Midrand and the N1 was open farmland. Today Waterfall City is one of the most ambitious developments in South Africa, and it is where our team lives and works every day. We have just released a full video on where Waterfall came from, what it is today and what is coming next. Here is the story in brief.
How big is Waterfall?
Waterfall covers about 2,200 hectares. To put that in perspective, you could place Monaco, Vatican City, La Défense in Paris, the City of London, Lower Manhattan, Sandton CBD, Cape Town CBD, Rosebank and Illovo on the land at the same time, and there would still be room to spare.
A farm named after a waterfall
In 1888, surveyor Peter McDonald was mapping the area when he came across a small waterfall on the property, and the name stuck. A year later, the title deed was signed by President Paul Kruger. Almost 50 years after that, in 1934, the Mia family bought the farm for £16,000, a purchase that would shape Waterfall as we know it.
Moosa Ismail Mia later placed the land with the Waterfall Islamic Institute as a waqf, an Islamic endowment. That means the land cannot be carved up and sold off in the conventional way. It stays together, while development rights are granted through long-term leases. That is why every home and business at Waterfall is leasehold rather than freehold, and why this enormous piece of land could be planned as one integrated city instead of growing piece by piece under dozens of different owners.
The developers who built it
Serious planning for modern Waterfall began in the late 1990s. Century Property Developments secured the residential rights and developed the Equestrian Estate, Waterfall Country Estate, Waterfall Country Village and the mature lifestyle estates, Waterfall Hills and Waterfall Valley. Attacq secured the commercial development rights in 2008, paving the way for the business district, Mall of Africa and the corporate skyline. Other developers followed, including Balwin, alongside partners responsible for schools, hospitals, retail and thousands of homes.
That is what makes Waterfall so unusual. It was not a suburb that slowly grew into a city. It was a vast piece of land, held together for generations, that made it possible to plan a whole city almost from scratch.
Waterfall in numbers
- Over 8,000 homes built, with 21,000 planned once everything is done
- Around 40,000 residents and 25,000 people coming to work here every day
- Over 100,000 people on the Go Waterfall app, the digital hub for everyday life in Waterfall
- About R3 billion spent on infrastructure: roads, stormwater, sewer lines and communications
- An estimated municipal valuation close to R50 billion
- Around R6.5 billion in GDP generated each year
What is being built now
This is Waterfall's busiest construction year in a decade, with 85,000 m² of new development underway. Around Mall of Africa, three buildings are going up: a retail and restaurant development, a 168-room hotel with a conference centre for over 1,000 people, and Aspire, a 20-storey residential tower with more than 200 units, over 160 of them already sold. At Gate 7, Balwin's River Bend development will add around 1,200 new units, starting early 2027.
Roads and access
If you have driven around Waterfall recently, you will have noticed a lot of road work. It means more route options and better traffic flow soon:
- Gate 3 at Waterfall Country Estate North is being tarred and should open to residents by the end of 2026. It extends Magwa Crescent, which runs from Waterfall Hospital around Mall of Africa to the PwC building.
- Simlak Drive runs from Gate 1 past Mall of Africa towards the N1, then parallel to the highway. A bridge linking it to Gate 7 should be finished by the end of 2026, so Gate 7 residents can turn right towards Sandton or left and head north towards Allandale Road.
- The section between Maxwell Drive and the R55 is under construction and will greatly improve traffic flow towards Rivonia.
- The K60 bridge over the N1, the biggest piece of the network, will be about 200 metres long and is expected to be completed by 2030.
- The K111, known as the Triple One, will eventually extend access to Marlboro on the eastern side of the N1.
- Gautrain: discussions are underway about a Waterfall station, though it is probably about five years away.
Security
Security at Waterfall is not an afterthought. More than 2,000 facial recognition cameras are monitored around the clock and integrated with the police. Since the system went in, suspicious vehicles have dropped from 35 a month to just 5. It has even flagged a vehicle carrying a man wanted by police in Secunda, who were alerted and came to collect him.
Munyaka Lake
Munyaka Lake covers more than three hectares and has its own water treatment facility, because water is a scarce resource in South Africa. It is one of the few venues where the Gauteng Open Water Swimming Association trains, because other dams nearby are simply too polluted.
Finding your place in Waterfall
From a single farm to a city of tens of thousands, Waterfall is still growing every day. Helping people find their place in it is the part of our job we love most.
Thinking of buying, selling or renting in Waterfall? We are here to show you around.
Figures are based on information shared by Waterfall management as at October 2026. Road and construction timelines are forecasts and may change.
