Seven days. That is the amount of days the Sandton office of the Estate Agency Affairs Board were open for business in the three months since lockdown restrictions were relaxed. Now their doors are closed again and will reopen on 1 September.
The South African government has been balancing the lives of its citizens and an economy in ICU on the tip of a very thin needle in a series of near death-defying decisions as it attempts to safely navigate the country through a pandemic.
South Africa’s real estate agents came out of lockdown with modest expectations that pent up demand and historic low interest rates will encourage market activity
Previous lacklustre efforts by the Estate Agency Affairs Board to make the residential property industry more racially inclusive meant that the black estate agent repeatedly got the short end of the stick.