Quoin Technologies has announced the launch of Datazone, its new market intelligence and reporting platform, alongside the appointment of Emeritus Professor François Viruly as Chief Economist of Datazone. The appointment strengthens the intellectual and economic rigour underpinning Quoin’s newly released data reports.
“Good, reliable data allows for sound property decisions,” said Professor Viruly. “Good decisions result in a robust and transparent property sector that grows.”
In property markets, decisions are rarely made on information alone. They are shaped by experience, judgement, local knowledge and context, often under conditions of long term uncertainty. While data is generated continuously through transactions and market activity, it only becomes meaningful once it can be collected, compared and analysed within a coherent and consistent framework.
Datazone has been established to address a long-standing gap in the property sector: the distance between decision-making and defensible quantitative explanation. Too often, assumptions are only interrogated after the fact, when outcomes are justified using fragmented sources and time-lagged data releases. Rather than focusing on one-off outputs or commentary, Datazone provides a persistent, continuously usable and moving reference layer that allows market behaviour to be observed, revisited and interpreted as conditions evolve. By prioritising consistency, continuity and shared definitions, it enables explanations to remain grounded even as markets shift.
As data availability has expanded, fragmentation across the property value chain has increased. Different participants observe the same market through different lenses, definitions and time horizons. Datazone is intentionally positioned at the intersection between raw data and analysed insight, creating the conditions under which information can be generated, tested and reused responsibly across multiple contexts.
The appointment of Professor Viruly reflects this philosophy.
In his role as Chief Economist of Datazone, Professor Viruly will guide the intellectual rigour underpinning Quoin’s market data reports, ensuring that outputs are not only current, but credible, disciplined and contextually sound.
Datazone is uniquely powered by the vacancy intelligence captured through Ownerzone, Quoin Technologies’ Landlord marketing and transactional platform. Ownerzone provides a continuously updated record of vacancy information that landlords maintain as part of their day‑to‑day portfolio management. This includes more than two years of vacancy history captured consistently nationally across multiple portfolios.
The real differentiator, however, lies in Datazone’s direct real‑time data flow from landlords. As owners and leasing managers update their vacancy positions, space statuses and portfolio changes within Ownerzone, Datazone receives this information instantly. Rather than relying on surveys, periodic submissions or lagged market releases, Datazone aggregates this live owner‑supplied data, anonymised and standardised, across multiple landlords as it happens.
No other system in the South African commercial property market provides this real‑time, multi‑owner vacancy intelligence at scale. By integrating directly with landlord vacancy platforms, Datazone captures the market not as a retrospective snapshot, but as a continuously moving indicator of actual conditions on the ground.
This live, aggregated vacancy view forms the backbone of Datazone’s reporting framework, enabling more accurate benchmarking, early trend detection and a level of transparency that has historically been missing from the sector.
Professor Viruly is one of South Africa’s most respected property economists, with more than three decades of experience analysing property markets across the country and the continent. A former academic at the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand, he has held senior research and leadership roles across academia, industry and professional bodies, including serving as President of the International Real Estate Society. He is a fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. His work has focused extensively on property cycles, long term market drivers and the relationship between urban economics and real estate performance.
In his role as Chief Economist of Datazone, Professor Viruly will guide the intellectual rigour underpinning Quoin’s market data reports, ensuring that outputs are not only current, but credible, disciplined and contextually sound.
Viruly says: “The power of Datazone will lie in it’s strength to create a point of reference that allows users to understand what is happening in the market, why it is happening, and how those patterns are expected to evolve over time.”
With the launch of Datazone, Quoin Technologies now brings together Brokerzone, Ownerzone and Datazone into a unified ecosystem that connects live market activity, operational platforms and rigorous market intelligence. Together, they support better decisions before they are made. Market transparency is also critical in enhancing the maturity and transparency of the market.
