Offices and shops for sale in La Nouvelle Medina

Buying commercial property in La Nouvelle Médina means buying the ground floor of a block in a neighbourhood whose population has grown faster than its shops. The shop units in Nouvelle Médina 1 and 2 were sold with the buildings, to the first buyers or to local traders, and they rarely change hands: retirement, an inheritance, a need for cash. There is no office building or shopping centre here; the typical business asset is a 30 to 80 m² shop, a storage depot or a double garage.

On Houni, listings for premises for sale in the delegation are rare, often none for weeks, then one or two posted by the owner of the property or by a Ben Arous agency. A buyer looking for premises for business use in the south of Tunis therefore has to think at governorate level: all the offices and shops for sale in Ben Arous governorate cover Ben Arous town, Mégrine, Radès and the industrial zones, where the supply is much wider.

What sells and where

Shop units are found in the numbered sectors, Nouvelle Médina 1 and 2, along the shopping streets and around the market. A unit let to a trader already in place is the most common purchase for an investor: it brings in rent from the day of signing, and the current lease passes on with the property. An empty unit, on the other hand, suits someone who wants to run their own business there, a pharmacy, a practice, a grocery, and it often costs more per square metre than an apartment in the same block if the location has good footfall.

In Errabta and Sidi Mosbah, the supply takes the form of garages, depots and house ground floors used as workshops, sometimes sold with the home above. In that case the whole house is for sale, and the page of houses for sale in La Nouvelle Médina is the other place to look. A mixed-use plot along the Mornag road follows the same logic, but such properties are even less frequent.

Yield and guide prices

The rental yield of a well-placed unit in the delegation is generally higher than that of an apartment, because commercial rents have kept pace with the neighbourhood's growth while sale prices for the premises are still those of an outer suburb. A small unit on a busy street often changes hands for between 120,000 and 250,000 DT depending on size and location; a garage or depot in a residential sector goes for well below that. These figures are reading benchmarks, not valuations: each unit is worth its footfall, and two neighbouring shops can differ in value by a factor of two.

Before working out a yield, check the rent actually paid, the current lease and its date, and how reliably the tenant pays; a unit let for fifteen years at a rent never reviewed earns less than it seems, and its tenant enjoys the right to renewal. To gauge local rental demand, the page of offices and shops to rent in the delegation gives the order of magnitude of asking rents.

Title, co-ownership, permitted use

A unit at the foot of a block has an individual land title resulting from the division of the building; insist on it, along with the co-ownership regulations, which may ban certain activities (catering, workshops, gas storage) or impose opening hours. Check the building permit for the block and that the unit has not been extended onto the pavement or onto a common area. For a garage or depot turned into a shop inside a house, it is the use itself that has to be regularised with the municipality, and most often it has not been.

If the unit is occupied, the commercial lease passes on with the property: the buyer becomes the landlord, with the obligations and time limits of the commercial lease law. If the unit is empty, ask the neighbours why the previous occupant left; in La Nouvelle Médina, an empty unit on a good street is relet within a few weeks, and a unit empty for a year is empty for a reason.