Olivia Dunne and Paul Skenes Give a Peek Inside Their Shared Florida Home

Our take

While this story centres on a US celebrity couple, it carries a few genuinely useful property lessons for South African buyers and renters worth unpacking. First, Dunne's co-op board rejection — despite a cash offer — is a sharp reminder that ownership structures matter enormously. In SA, sectional title schemes have body corporate rules and conduct rules that can restrict who occupies a unit and how it's used, though they stop short of the US co-op board's outright veto power. Buyers in complexes and estates here should scrutinise conduct rules before making an offer, particularly around short-term letting, pets, and home-based businesses. Second, the couple's strategy of owning multiple properties in different cities mirrors what SA's dual-city professionals increasingly do — maintaining a primary residence in, say, Cape Town while holding a buy-to-let or pied-à-terre in Johannesburg. Finally, the sheer volume of PR packages Dunne acknowledged as "almost all hers" is a quiet nod to how influencer income is reshaping who qualifies as a high-net-worth buyer — a trend SA banks and bond originators are slowly beginning to accommodate when assessing non-salaried income.