Bill Rawson, Chairman of the Rawson Property Group, has drawn attention to an article published in the December 2013 edition of “Agent”, the official publication of the Estate Agency Affairs Board.
This makes it clear that of all the nine provinces in South Africa today, the Western Cape has by far the lowest percentage (12,9%) of repeat home buyers (i.e. not first time buyers) leaving the province and the strongest net inflow (6,7%) of repeat buyers from other provinces.
This situation, the article suggests, is due to the Western Cape’s economy being the second largest in South Africa, to its having the second fastest growth rate and the ability to offer job opportunities. Also influencing the migration pattern is the Western Cape’s “perceived high quality lifestyle”, which, it is suggested, is superior to that offered by any other South African province.
The article also reports that three of the “big four” provinces (Gauteng, KZN and the Eastern Cape) are experiencing net outward migrations of repeat buyers and this, it suggests, is likely to affect the economies of those provinces adversely, even though a high percentage of the migrators are leaving for reasons not related to their work, e.g. retirement. Gauteng, the article says, has the lowest loss of skilled, still active workers.
As would be expected, the larger, more economically active centres, especially those in Gauteng, experienced the biggest net inflow of aspirant first time home buyers in the early stages of their working lives. The threat to the economics of the five smaller provinces is shown by the fact that 31% of total repeat buyers left Limpopo, 33,3% left North West, 29,9% left Northern Cape, 26,1% left Free State and 24,3% left Mpumalanga.
“Analysing the survey,” says Rawson, “home owners in the Western Cape, whose property prices have over the last three or four decades always been more stable, and stayed well ahead of the national average, can take comfort that this trend is likely to continue, even though the economic growth rate in Gauteng is significantly ahead of that of the Western Cape.”
