MAIN IMAGE: Deli Nkambule, acting CEO of the PPRA; Hayley Inves-Downes, Lightstone; Nondumiso Ncapai of ABSA; Gary Baker of the Better Homes Group
Danie Keet
There are many challenges facing the PPRA and its implementation of the Property Practitioners Act, promulgated earlier this year.
This is according to Deli Nkambule, acting CEO of the PPRA at the recent Private Property real estate summit, the REIS, where insightful information was shared on the state of the property sector, the current challenges, and the trends they are seeing in the market.
Nkambule told the summit the transitioning to the PPRA has not been easy, but they continue to do their best to implement the legislation.
Some of the problems being encountered now include:
- The interpretation clauses and stakeholder engagements leads to confusion and dissatisfaction among stakeholders.
- A complete overhaul of the IT infrastructure is urgently needed
- Investment in new technology is necessary to improve efficiency
- Portal downtime is hampering administrative activities resulting in manual receiving of documents through designated email addresses.
- New educational requirements are not in place, but consultations with the industry is underway
- The non-registration of new property practitioners is also still problematic.
“We strive to implement our vision and ultimate objective of the PPRA, which is the regulation of property practitioners and their conduct when dealing with consumers. This needs to be done to ensure that we protect consumers in terms of the Act from any undesirable actions of property practitioners as well as educate consumers about their rights.
“We are focused on transforming the industry in line with the mandate stipulated in Chapter 4 of our Act, while it is also our responsibility to educate, train and develop property practitioners at all levels. We also need to issue FFC’s to all compliant property practitioners, ”Nkambule stated.
Nkambule said the amendments to the created a wider definition which includes new role players such as developers, timeshare and fractional ownership, property advertising, business brokers, bond and bridging finance originators, homeowners’ associations, managing agents, property facilitators, and intermediaries.
“Other issues addressed in the new act include the introduction of a 3-year FFC, disclosure forms that need to be completed by the lessor and seller, that conveyancers pay commissions to registered practitioners and the introduction of BEE certificates for juristic persons.”
Lightstone’s Hayley Inves-Downes said at the summit when looking at the current market 06.9 million of 8.3 million properties are classified as residential, and each is valued individually for a total value of R6tn. Of these a quarter are valued under R250 000.
“The 3 powerhouse provinces of Gauteng, KZN, and Western Cape, make up close to 2/3 of the volume of the properties, close to 80% of the value of the market. Looking at some of the trends we’re seeing in the market, we see when looking at how people moved around over the last decade, we see that urbanisation is still very much a thing. There is massive population growth in places like Gauteng, Cape Town, and Durban and interestingly also in other smaller cities in the Eastern Cape and the Garden Route.
“This is expected during tough economic conditions, when people migrate to large metropolitan areas in the hopes of finding better work opportunities. Post Covid, knowledge workers might spread out a bit, but the urbanisation trend for lower income employees will continue.
“This meant that we’ve seen steep increases in the provinces with large cities with the estimated number of households in Gauteng growing from 4 million to 5 million and KZN growing to just under 3 million with the Western Cape growing too close to 2 million households Interestingly though that in Gauteng the proportion of households earning 11k per month or less went up to 56% and in KZN also up to 73% showing that the vast majority of the population growth happens in the lower income segment. In the Western Cape, the lower income band also grew, but here we’ve also seen the proportion of households with an estimated income higher than 85k increase from 6 to 8%,”she said.
Nondumiso Ncapai of ABSA said there only 6.7 million registered properties and South Africa’s real estate industry needs to build ecosystems that speaks to the South African context.
“Customers want various support systems, including management systems to pay for renovations, promotions and discounts on home renovations and packages to address the complexity of the home buying and selling processes. They would prefer to pay one fee, and we, the banks, or financiers, take care of the rest by supplying support and guidance for home sellers.
“On the investing side customers need legal help with the way to grow and manage their rental portfolio and to manage processes with rental landlords and agents. They need to manage rental relationships with landlords and rental agents.”
Gary Baker of the Better Homes Group, spoke about challenges and opportunities in the industry.
“Consumers are becoming much more aware of the market through sold analysis therefore the industry needs more data to prepare and educate the consumer. They also need more leads and profiling to increase the number of lead sources, but be aware of the necessity to profile, qualify and nurture such leads. This could be done through operating platforms and connectivity providing open operating systems that provide integration, connectivity, customisation, and scalability.”
