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Price your property right
RealEstateWeb - South Africa
Avoiding the pitfalls of overpricing, getting the best property price

PRETORIA: Property owners often complain that agents undervalue their property for a quick sale, but overpricing a property can be a bigger mistake. If you want to attract a fair offer for your property, price it right, especially during tough times.

"Too often people want to pay their kids' college tuition and retire on the proceeds of their property," says RealNet Silver Estates owner Yolanda Pelser. She is joking, but only just. She stresses that people tend to overprice property when they first offer it to the market and exacerbate the problem by signing lengthy sole mandates with agents.
RealEstateWeb

FNB Building and Fixed Investment Update
FNB - South Africa
Conclusion
Early signs of an improving residential building environment are emerging slowly. These come in the form of improving demand for existing houses in response to big interest rate cuts, causing existing house prices to start rising again, while input cost inflation for builders appears to be declining. These 2 factors together may be contributing to the start of a narrowing gap between replacement value of homes (and average price of new homes) and existing house prices, which could lead to a situation where the development sector can bring more competitively priced new stock to the market as time goes by.

The process looks set to be a slow one, however. As yet, there is little sign of building activity turning the corner, and it is only expected to be well-into 2010 when we see any noticeable improvement in the completions numbers. Such are the lengthy leads and lags in the trend changes between the existing home market and the new development market, especially when the current recovery in the existing home market can at best be described as a moderate one.
FNB Building and Fixed Investment Update

Building plans passed continue to decrease
Business Day - South Africa
The total value of recorded building plans passed at current prices continues to decline, Statistics SA said today.

"The value of recorded building plans passed by larger municipalities at current prices during January to September 2009 decreased by 26.9% compared with January to September 2008," the Pretoria-based agency said.
The largest drop was reported for residential buildings (-43.3%), followed by additions and alterations (-11.4%) and non-residential buildings (-10.1%).
Business Day

Latest Rode's Report on the SA Property market shows scant improvement
Rode and Associates - South Africa
While property's PR machine may have started talking about green shoots appearing, the facts reveal that the brakes - in terms of the growth in market rentals - are being applied more firmly now. This is according to data revealed in the latest Rode's Report on the SA Property Market.

On the office front, even while some CBD nodes are still recording fairly good growth in market rentals, the underlying trend seems to be one of deceleration, with growth in certain decentralized nodes (among them Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban) having cooled to single digits. The only exception to this rule, according to the Report, appears to be Pretoria, where decentralized market rentals were, on average, still up by an impressive 15%.
Rode