‘Soweto brand’ puts boom in townships
Business News
Johannesburg’s former black townships are riding the crest of the residential property price boom. This emerges from deeds office data analysed by Fin-Mark Trust and Urban Land-Mark, working with data management company Metonymy.
Carel van Aardt, research director at the University of South Africa’s Bureau of Market Research, attributed the demand for housing in these areas to the upgrading of Soweto and “a cultural bonding” that has produced a “Soweto Brand”. The township property index, compiled by Lighthouse Risk Management, shows dramatic annual price inflation from just under five percent in 2000 to 39 percent in March 2007.
John Loos, a property strategist at First National Bank, said structural change, including the upgrading of shopping malls, had dramatically changed perceptions of Soweto. He said that migration of skilled people to Gauteng had contributed to greater demand for housing in the region.
NGOs tipped to address Africa’s housing crisis
Business News
Access to housing and to housing finance by low-income earners is a critical development issue facing most countries around the globe, says the FinMark Trust, an organisation that promotes access to finance for the poor.
Conventional sources of finance are unlikely to meet the projected demand for infrastructure and housing in many developing countries and developmental agencies and others are trying to find alternatives. FinMark says: “The problem is quit simple. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, income levels are such that the majority of households cannot afford to buy the least expensive house, even if mortgage finance is available”.
In this environment, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as housing microlenders have emerged as an important source of housing finance for low-income earners whose access to more traditional forms of credit is constrained, both by their affordability and the housing circumstances in which they live.
FinMark believes that the Solution to Africa’s housing crisis may be found in the cooperation between NGOs and the established financial sector seeking to deliver housing finance to the emerging African markets.
Crunch time, bleak outlook for 2008
Business Times
With higher interest rates and the global credit crunch set to spill over into the local economy, 2008 is set to be South Africa’s most challenging real estate year since the beginning of the five year property boom which started in 2002.
While there is a definite slowdown looming, one must not forget that the fundamental drivers of the South African economy are very much in place. The growing emergent black investor class, the hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup and the government’s infrastructural project roll-out are still around and will drive the property market in the medium term. So South Africans, who fear long-term doom and gloom in the market, are misplaced.
In many ways the cool down is a welcome interval for property buyers who have been excluded from an over heated property market. In reality next year promises to be a short-term window of opportunity to get into a far more realistic property market, before it starts recovering as we enter 2009.
Court frees towns from tribal claims
Business Report
The towns of Komatipoort, Hectorspruit, Malelane and the entire holiday town of Marloth Park, comprising more than 4 000 stands have been prevented from being returned to a number of tribal community land claimants.
This follows a judgment delivered to a side application to one of the largest land claim applications in South Africa, involving 30 000ha in the nearby area.
The area is an important economic and tourist node that forms part of the Maputo corridor, the gateway between South Africa and Mozambique.
Judge Shanaaz Meer ruled that it was neither in the public interest nor feasible that the land within the delineated urban edges of the four towns should be restored to any land claimant.
In reaching her decision she considered the fact that a substantial portion of land had already been restored to the claimants, furthermore the built up land that had already been restored to them is of much more value than the rural land they were dispossessed of.
Pay-back time against nasty neighbours
Realestateweb.co.za - South Africa
Annoyed with your neighbour's renovations and building extensions? Then you can get them demolished - new court ruling.
A very important decision was taken by the South Eastern Cape Local Division Courts when they enforced their ability to have an owner demolish his buildings because the correct provisions are not in the title deed.
The case was reported as Van Rensburg and Another v Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality and Others - 2007 4 All SA 950 (SE).
In summary: residential neighbours were embroiled in a dispute about buildings on urban property. The applicants sought an order for the demolition of the offending buildings on the property and an interdict to prevent nuisance emanating from the property.
Land inequality in SA a 'ticking time bomb'
Mail&Guardian.co.za - South Africa
For more than a decade, Molefi Selibo has been sent from pillar to post by the South African authorities in a futile quest to own a plot of land for his family.
"Land to us, it is a very key issue. There is a hunger for land in South Africa," says Selibo as he looks out across the rolling green hills of Muldersdrift which he still one day hopes to transform into a thriving village.
"It is very, very, very frustrating. It is more than 10 years. People become disillusioned, they start questioning whether this thing is progressing," says Selibo, eyeing the land which lies fallow.
His frustration is indicative of a wider sense of disillusionment about the pace of land reforms in post-apartheid South Africa