By Justin Clarke on Tuesday, December 6, 2011
We bust a real estate myth, South Africans still love property and consider it an excellent investment. This comes from an extensive survey conducted by Private Property and market research company Columinate. Some of the results were astounding. Read more to get a few juicy incites…
By Justin Clarke on Wednesday, May 25, 2011
This morning I received an email from a person who had read an article that I wrote, and he was asking what are the “fundamentals” property investors talk about so prolifically. I got to thinking that maybe they are not so obvious. So here are my fundamentals…
By Ewald Kellerman on Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Are aspiring home buyers scared to buy property currently? The demand/supply balance still shows heavy oversupplies. Potential buyers are constrained by significant increases in their cost of living, while high levels of indebtedness leave them vulnerable to any future interest rate increases. However, reduced confidence levels are exactly what is needed to fuel the recovery.
By Ewald Kellerman on Tuesday, May 3, 2011
The April 2011 FNB House Price Index showed further mild acceleration in year-on-year growth on March’s revised rate of 1.2%, to 2.2%. This is the 2nd successive month of mild acceleration in year-on-year house price growth, an event which we believe is the lagged result of a further brief flurry of interest rate cutting by the Reserve Bank (SARB) late in 2010. Those rate cuts caused a mild uptick in residential demand which may have been more than just the usual summer seasonal factors.
By Justin Clarke on Monday, March 28, 2011
The trick to investing in property is efficient gearing, put simply, using a large proportion of other people’s money, most likely borrowed from a bank. If you have a large proportion of your real estate portfolio financed, and the total value of the Real Estate goes up by a few percentage points, your return on [...]
By Justin Clarke on Monday, October 25, 2010
The year started off well with a storm of real estate activity and normalization of the market leading up to the world cup. But this quarter has been very unexciting with little activity with house prices dropping off marginally. Is this something we should worry about?
By Ewald Kellerman on Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Stringent lending criteria by home loan banks have been a hot topic for quite some time now. At a stage of the property downturn, estate agents surveyed by FNB were quoting this as a major reason for weak activity levels in the property market. Around that time, banks had started restricting loan-to-value policies for new loans granted, implying an increased number of loans for which significant deposits were required.
By Neale Petersen on Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A recent headline article published in the latest Financial Mail written by Ian Fife called “The big property clean-out” is causing ructions in the residential investment sector. The article identifies a number of property companies, trusts and individuals who were casualties in the current property market. Included in the article on-going court case of the [...]
By Brennan Carey on Monday, November 30, 2009
For those property owners that are wanting to sell their properties the odds are that you have a mortgage on that property with one of the banks. When a seller sells their property the existing mortgage needs to be canceled on transfer and the seller is responsible for payment thereof. Most sellers are unaware that [...]
