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Buying a house? How to make sure your OTP is successful
You have found your dream home, and now you want to sign on the dotted line to make it your own.

“Remember that an Offer to Purchase (OTP) is legally binding, so only offer what you can afford. Make sure everything else is in order and soon you'll be holding the keys to your new home,” says Carl Coetzee, CEO of BetterBond.

Here's how to make sure your OTP is successful:

Find a place to call home
Do your homework during your house-hunt and find a place you can happily call home. Take your time, and view it more than once, to make sure it's the place for you. Some of the most important questions to think about, include:
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Can the rental market recover in 2021?
Tenants within the lower-end of the rental market are still struggling to pay their rent, as recovery slowly inches to pre-lockdown levels, according to TPN credit bureau data.

The reality is that millions of South Africans are struggling with job losses and financial pressures due to the deep economic contraction that began in the second quarter of 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"While the residential tenant payment performance recovery is on the right trajectory, current figures remain well below those recorded pre-lockdown, indicating that both the economy and the employment rate is battling to fully recover after Q2 2020 and the strictest lockdown," says TPN Chief Executive Michelle Dickens,

TPN's rental monitor shows rentals across South Africa saw their inflation convert to deflation in the 4th quarter of 2020.
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SARB holds rate steady, as 'KZN leads property market recovery'
The South African Reserve Bank's (SARB) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) has decided to hold the repo rate at 3.5% and the prime lending rate at 7% after its second Monetary Policy Council meeting for 2021.

Lesetja Kganyago, SARB Governor says the "overall risks to the inflation outlook appear to be balanced", with the MPC making a "unanimous decision" to keep the repo rate as is.

"South Africa’s economy expanded by 6.3% on a quarterly, annualised basis in the fourth quarter of 2020, and contracted by 7% for the year as a whole. The Bank’s forecast for GDP for the first quarter of 2021 stands at -0.2%, down from 1.0% at the time of the January MPC meeting. With stronger quarterly outcomes for the rest of this year, the economy is expected to grow by about 3.8% (up from 3.6%).

Kganyago acknowledged recovery to pre-pandemic levels would take time, outlining the "rising cost of fuels, ongoing constraints to the domestic supply of energy and uncertainty about vaccine rollout continue to pose downside risks". Read the full statement here..
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I signed a sole mandate but didn't understand what I was signing, what can I do?
A Property24 reader says his elderly mother signed a sole mandate, without understanding "what she was signing".

“What can I do if the agent doesn't want to give me a copy of the sole mandate?"

According to the reader, "The agent did not explain to her what she was signing. He didn't even go through the sole mandate contract with her and now he doesn't want to give me a copy of the contract. What do we do in this instance?”

Property Expert Jaco Rademeyer, from Jaco Rademeyer Estates, responds says, "A sole exclusive mandate is an agreement where the seller gives just one agency the sole right to market the property, for a limited time only.

"If another estate agent sells the property during this period, and the mandate states that the estate agent has 'sole and exclusive selling rights' or 'sole right to sell' or 'sole authority to sell', the estate agent with the sole mandate can claim damages from the seller, which could be equal to the commission that he could have earned if he sold the property.

"The seller therefore renounces the right to sell the property himself during this exclusive mandate period. The seller needs to do his homework to ensure he appoints a reliable and competent agent, that will do everything legally possible to sell the house.
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