 And a very, very warm good afternoon to you. If you've just joined us, welcome to the second Nexus for the day. Nexus, of course, our series specifically designed to create connection and networking amongst the industry. I like to give people a little bit of time to find their feet, to figure out their way on the platform. I wanna just say a very warm welcome. Welcome to my colleagues from private property. Welcome Jan from PayProp. Welcome Michelle, welcome Quad. Welcome Tando. Your head welcome to you again. Sundiswa, good afternoon and welcome as well. Puti McDonald, I see you there. Welcome, welcome to Nexus. Let's give it a few more minutes to see if we're going to have more people joining us. Templeton is on my table, he's from Expello and he already said hello to us. Hi Toya, I see you. Hi Hestimari, Swannapool, I see you too. Welcome to Nexus. Welcome Ken, Ken from Yavits in the Midlands, KZN. Good afternoon to you Ken and thank you so much for taking time out of this Monday afternoon to join us. We're very, very thrilled to have you here. Hi Lee, how are you Miss Lee Holling? And Ben, hello. Thank you for helping me do this thing today. Sarvas, good afternoon to you. Kristal, good afternoon. And I think that's everyone that I've greeted so far. Actually there's a Tia garage from Prime Property Musgrave. Also welcome to you Tremaine Naidu, I see you there. Welcome to Linda, Denise Manley. Welcome to Private Properties Nexus. Nashin Nathan, welcome to you as well. I think let's give it a few more minutes and then we get started. There's quite a bit to get through today. Hi, is it Craig? Craig Jason Wood from Ian Wiles Auctioneers. Welcome Craig and thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Gugu from Amansum Toti. Hello everyone, hello, hello, hello. Please use this chat facility here, the chat box here to engage. Say hello to your colleagues. Say hello to some of your fellow compatriots. Hello Shirley from Harcourts. Hi Lorraine Lafferty. I see you there Fiona Crago or Colletta saying hi to Fiona. Okay, I think let's get cracking. We've got quite a bit to get through. But before we get started, let me start by just saying good day to everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first series of Nexus. Over the next few days, we're going to be presenting a couple of these engagement opportunities. I'm Tracy Lee Miller and I'm the Brand and Marketing Executive at Private Property and I will be your virtual host for this afternoon's session. The word Nexus, as you may know, actually means a series of connections linking two or more things. And that is exactly what the Nexus events are about. It's a series of digital networking events, events which cultivates people connection through knowledge sharing and networking. Our first Nexus was hosted in November last year, very well received by the industry. It had a much more national focus. So this time around we decided to bring it back, make it a bit bigger and better than before. And one way that we're doing this is by tailoring the events to specific regions so that the insights we share and discuss are hyper relevant to you in your area, giving you the best possible chance of achieving success even in this tough market. So I have a couple of things to share with you before we go on. There's a chat box to the right hand side of the screen. Please use it to engage with us during the event. Also, you'll be able to see right at the end of that bar, there's a Q and A, if you click on Q and A, you can ask a question. So I'm going to ask a question in here. What is your favorite, favorite color? And then can, your favorite color? And let's say, if someone thinks that this question is a good enough question that needs to be upvoted, I'm going to ask that question anonymously. You can upvote the question. I'm not sure who upvoted it, but we then can see at the end of the session whether this is actually a question that we need to get answered by the presenter. But use the Q and A to almost park your questions because we're not going to ask questions through while the people are talking. So that's the first one. The other one that I need for you to remember is this is very engaging. So we have something called a Vinty Meter. And for that, we're going to ask you to have your cell phones close at hand, make sure that it's fully charged. We'll give you the website that where you can find mentee, mentee.com. And then we'll play a little game. The other one that I think is important for me to mention to you here is that we have one and a half non-verifiable CBD points, CPD points on offer from Aisa. Thank you. And to get these points, please stick around until you get to the end of the session and then we'll drop the link where you can register and go and get those points. All right, I think we are Fiona Jean-Prago. Your favorite color is blue. Hello, Sully. I see you. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I believe it's a bit hot over there in KZN. I'm all the way out here in Hau-Tinh. In fact, very close to Virts in somewhere in downtown Bramfrontin. Okay, I want to maybe see, let me know where you're watching from. If you haven't already told me, just give me a sense of where you're watching from. This morning session, we actually had someone watching all the way from the UK wanting to just get a better understanding of the market in the area that the region that we presented. Hello, Carl. I see you there. Can you tell me where you're from? Bluff. I see, ooh, it's going so fast. I can't even keep up. Your head all the way in Stellenbosch. Okay, look at that. So we've got people from all over the Quasulunatal area here today. Of course, private property has a very special relationship with this province. It is the province of our brand's birth more than 22 years ago. How many of you, last question, then we're going to get our first speaker on the Mariana. Your favorite color is pink. I got you. I got you. And the beautiful Zambali Missal. You're joining us from Zambali. Impangeni for Chantel and Tyson Bluff for Quad. Linda Pele, you're a rosin bluff. Okay, I got you. Awesome, awesome stuff. Great stuff. Right, I think studio, if we can get our first speaker to the stage. The speaker this afternoon, of course, is Absa's regional manager. Her name is Venusia Naidu. She's the regional manager for Home Loans. KZDN, I met her last week when we were doing the dry rat thing. She's going to have so much interesting insights to share with us. And without further ado, Venusia, we can hear you clearly. I'm going to put my microphone on mute. I'll put my camera off. But I'm always here. All right, enjoy the station, guys. Thank you so much, Tracy. Really, really appreciate that very, very warm welcome. And I think it's most fitting because I come to you live from the most warmest province in the country. So very excited to be here with you all today. So I think as Tracy mentioned, I am Venusia. I look after the Absa Home Loans franchise in KZDN and I am so, so excited to be here with you all today on this virtual stage. It would have been really nice for us to see each other face to face in province, staring out over into the Indian Ocean. But I think this is going to have to do for now because we must put safety first. And I think before we go on, I just want to say a huge thank you to our strategic partners, Tracy and the rest of the team from Private Property for having me here today and for hosting such an awesome event once again. If we could please move on to the next slide. Thank you. Perfect. So guys, if you see this slide, don't panic. So 2020, wow. What a year, right? And what a journey it has been for all of us. The year that we coined is 2020. I remember when we were celebrating New Year for 2020, we said, oh, this is going to be 2020. A year that was going to be generous for all of us. However, I don't think any of us anticipated how those last 12 months would have unfolded for us. COVID-19 has had a huge impact, not only on our property industry, but on our province, our country and to the world at large. And I think for us here in KZN, we were very, very unfortunate to have seen quite a bit of devastation. I mean, I think most of you can relate. Do you remember driving through the coastline on the M4 during December and seeing that emptiness on our beaches? That was extremely, extremely sad and heartbreaking. If I had to look back to exactly a year ago, we were getting ready to go into lockdown level five. What was level five? It was a concept unknown to us. And for this industry in particular, it meant a complete shutdown. It meant that you and I were unable to do what we loved doing for two whole months. Those months also required us to rethink what was important as well as find a way and navigate life in a huge pandemic. I'm sure over the past year as well, we all know somebody or know of somebody who has lost a loved one. I think before we go on to the next level, it would be really remiss of me to not remember our late King Goodwill's Valentini, our Zulu King who lost his life a few days ago. May his soul rest in peace. So what exactly the 2020 and the COVID pandemic mean for the property industry? I would like to call this slide the tale of two halves, two very, very opposing halves, actually. So if you looked at the first half of the year or what we would call half one or H1, we were seen in a situation where it was really a downturn and a detract in the economy and we saw our application volumes drop at an unprecedented 9% decline when being compared to 2019. However, it was not all doom and gloom because as we moved on to age two, we saw a really, really different picture, quite the opposite actually. It was very remarkable for us to witness property sales bounce back in the second half of the year and I'm sure you all felt that way. In a way, when we were taken out of the industry for that two month period, it was something that was unprecedented. To be honest, it felt like a scene from a movie but as we got into age two, we saw our application volumes grow by 36%. I remember moments last year in age two where we had to actually just sit, reflect and breathe. It was very exciting to see those volumes in a pandemic because I think when we got into March and April last year, we actually thought, okay, guys, what is this? Is it doom and gloom? Is it doomsday? So I think it was quite remarkable to almost see that shift. From a case against specific perspective, we saw a decline of 9.2% in H1 and the recovery of just under 20% in the second half of the year. In addition, I think from a deeds office perspective, we saw this growth in activity translate into greater registrations within the second half of the year and that registrations in age two equated to more than double the number of registrations that we saw in H1. Another very interesting point to share because bearing in mind that we were in a pandemic and they were COVID challenges, we did not see a decline in the quality of customer coming through the door last year. We were actually seeing the quality of customer holding out as we entered age two. As a bank, this was very pleasing for us because it enabled us to keep our approval rates in line with those of pre-lockdown level. Yes, you heard correctly, pre-lockdown levels. This then drove our surge of registrations in the second half of the year. So from an industry perspective, you can really see why I call this slide the tale of two halves because firstly, we saw a dramatic downturn in the first half of the year and then an even more dramatic increase in the second half of the year. If anything, I think this tale is truly testament to the resilience of the human spirit and turning a negative into a positive. If we can go on to the next slide, please. So while all of this was happening, we were all sitting back and watching everything unfold in front of us. It was exciting. The activity in the market, it was phenomenal. But what exactly did this tell us about our customers and what they were thinking? What was guiding their thought process as they went through this pandemic and ultimately what led their purchases? This brings us to the next slide, which is known as our home ownership sentiment index, also affectionately known to us at APSA as the APSA HSI. The most exciting part of this index was to watch the movement of our customers across different types, as well as different provinces. So essentially what this index is, it's a test of our customers confidence in the property market. Very, very pleasing for us to see was at the end of last year, customer confidence was at the highest. But wait for it, guys. The real gem here to come out of this index was that it was not the highest just for 2020. It was the highest since the inception of the index, which was in 2015. And bearing in mind, all of this happening in the middle of a pandemic, ladies and gents, simply amazing. Now, when looking at the index, there are two factors to consider. What we call the demand side and the supply side. Both of these factors contributed to the increase we saw in customer confidence at the end of last year. Firstly, if we had to look at the demand side, there were two points to consider. One being the ability of property to increase in value over time. Secondly, our current low interest rate cycle, which made debt financing more affordable. And when we cross over to the supply side, we have seen confidence originating from resilient house prices. The second point to consider has to definitely be the renewed motivation by owners to invest in their own properties. The conversation here we can see of renovations taking importance. Ultimately, a combination of this led to the increase in confidence by 4% at the end of last year, ending of the year with an overall national sentiment of 80%. From a KZN perspective, we do not fare off very far from the national sentiment of 80%, with KZN ending the year with an overall sentiment of 77%. If we can go on to the slide for region fees. We now take a look at the overall sentiment from a regional perspective, taking into account our large metro area that being KwaZulu Natal, Hauteng and the Western Cape. It is most pleasing to see across all big metros. All of the metros have shown an increase in the overall sentiment. We must acknowledge the notable increase of 10% by our sister province, the Western Cape, in comparison to prior years. A huge factor to consider here would be that of immigration. This drive to the sentiment could attribute to customers having the need to work from anywhere they want to virtually. At the heart of this is definitely the decision of lifestyle and the ease of the comfortable work from home environment. Let's be honest guys, who wouldn't want to glimpse out at the Indian Ocean once you logged on to an MS team scholar resumes meeting? I would definitely want to look at that view. Hauteng, however, remained the region with the highest sentiment at 81%. This was evidenced by the largest increase in applications coming in via Hauteng last year. From a KZN perspective, as mentioned, we came in at 77% with us being just 3% under the national sentiment and up by 6%. Particular points of interest for KZNR. There was a 78% sentiment of buying over renting. Ultimately, the question of why you can rent why rent if you can buy is a factor to consider. The sentiment was 76% towards investing and we all know that property is a solid asset to invest in. This coupled with our low interest rate cycle made investing a very appealing option for our customers. We also saw an increase in renovations, once again adding to the need to make lifestyle choices while work from home became more of a permanent reality. A comfortable work environment in a pandemic definitely taking center stage here as we all got used and accustomed to being more at home than going out. In addition, from a KZN perspective, we saw quite a bit of movement in cloud coastal areas such as the south coast. This gave customers great value for money coupled with the appealing lifestyle of a coastal offering another factor to consider was our KZN climate. We now look at home owner sentiment by customer type. We looked at the four types as mentioned on the graph in plan of view. We can see across all customer types we have seen an improvement in the sentiment by the end of the year. Thus boosting overall confidence. The two customer types that really stood out is very interesting were the existing home owners which was the orange line as well as on the investors which was the dark purple line. Existing home owners have always lagged behind the others most likely due to a lower than expected financial benefit having already gone through the process of buying and selling property. However, their customers we have seen the greatest growth in the sentiment from the end of 2019 to the end of 2020 with a 10% increase. Noteworthy to mention is that where the sentiment was in Q1 of 2020 to the change at the end of last year. Once again driven by the new ways of work the lifestyle impact of lockdown where we all are looking for homes with study a bigger garden for kids where there isn't an urgent need to be as close to work as normal with most of South Africa working from home. Obviously we must take into account our low interest rates. The investor segment had the highest drop in sentiment in the heart of lockdown which was around Q1 as investors chose not to add to their property portfolios and adopted a wait-and-see approach. This was very understandable with what was happening it was heavily influenced by economic activity and the uncertainty in the market as well as a sharp increase in rental defaults as customers faced lockdown pressures. This was also the time in the market where the banks introduced payment relief initiatives. However, this investment segment has bounced back and returned to the top with the highest sentiment lightly above first-time home buyers who drove most of the surgeon activity last year. If there's one thing the slide teaches us it's that 2020 was definitely the year to get into property. From a case in perspective we saw the following horizon investor purchases predominantly in our coastal spots once again tying into the concept of immigration and the choice of a coastal lifestyle. We saw an inflow of first-time home buyers and predominantly female as well. We noticed that the popular suburbs for first-time home buyers were in the Durban central precinct, Morningside, Essenwood and the Windermere area definitely a focus on areas that are centrally located. If we can go on to the next slide please. Okay, if we had to look at a buying versus a selling sentiment the sentiment towards buying property which is the top red line in red returned to 2019 pre-COVID levels by mid-year last year. You can see that came into effect around July last year and ended 8% higher with a year-on-year comparison. I think this was also the time when the industry was allowed back into into trading and when lockdown levels had dropped. This is the main driver between the increase in interest rates in property interest in properties. I'm also sure you experienced this in the market and you experienced this last year as well. We must however note the bottom line where the sentiment towards selling has still not recovered to 2019 levels. This has decreased by 7% year-on-year. Whilst we do note the gradual improvement we are still not at pre-lockdown levels. This means that the gap between wanting to sell and wanting to buy continues to widen meaning that at this point in time they are more willing buyers in the market than they are willing sellers. We have seen the impact the continuation of property prices in the market specifically in our lower segments of 750 to 1.5 which is where most of the activity occurred. It is also placing a huge pressure on stock in this price which may result in property prices starting to increase. Purchase prices have in general been higher as buyers have been reaching to more expensive properties given the improvements in affordability resulting from our low interest rate cycle as well as we anticipate that activity starts to increase into the next price band. From a case in perspective we have felt the pressure of stock already predominantly in our lower price bands. These are the properties we know that are on the market for a few days and sell within days of being listed. This is a trend that may creep into our higher price bands as well as as stock concerns start to become a bigger focus. So what does the future hold for us? What is our crystal ball of property saying for all of us and for our industry? If we can go on to the next slide we will now come on to the topic of interest rates. I think that is key for anybody right now, interest rates. So we have established by now that the low interest rate cycle has been the driver of positive sentiment and the coincidental increase in home purchases. The age old adage of strike while the iron is hot is very true now and in this case the iron most definitely is low interest rates. We believe that although the interest rate cycles have essentially reached the bottom of the cycle they will remain at current levels until Q4 of this year before they gradually start to rise. The rise however will be so gradual that our interest rates will not have recovered to pre-lockdown levels by the time we get to the end of 2023. Next slide please. House prices. So we now find ourselves in what is a demand and supply scenario at play. The recent developments in supporting an increase in the number of willing buyers has placed an upward pressure in the prices that are coming through of our properties. However, how much of that will be supported by increase is yet to be seen. Once again the conversation topic of is this a buyer's market or is this a seller's market? Purchase prices in general have been higher as buyers have been reaching to buy more expensive properties given the improvements in affordability taking into account our low interest rate cycle. We would now look at market growth per province. If you look at the red bars at the bottom reflecting market growth for the 2020 period we can see that across the board all regions perform lower than 2019. Demonstrating that despite the amazing recovery we had in age two it was not sufficient enough to recover year and year in comparison to 2019. Once again drawing your attention to the tale of two halves the top row shows the predictions for 2021 which were calculated at the end of last year. We can see that the expectations are positive across all the regions for 2021 with a particular note to our region and noting the 4% growth expected for 2021. However, in many cases the moment we saw the coming in of 2020 our applications in December were up 47% versus 2019. So we think the market may even grow a bit more than what we have predicted. After full two months of performance in 2021 we can say that our application volumes are continuing to be resilient up 21% versus February last year before the pandemic guys. There is still a level of uncertainty in forecasting these models however for the year ahead. We will also have to note our deeds office closures are rising in some of our regions and with the possibility of a third wave there is some uncertainty. I think it's safe at this point guys to say that all of our crystal balls are a little murky at this point in time. However, from a case in perspective we do remain hopeful for the next couple of months and as a region we were quite hit significantly by the impact of COVID as well as deeds office closures. We are thankful that 2021 has gone up to a better start and we remain cautiously optimistic. We are not superstitious people but we keep our fingers crossed nonetheless. And I think the one thing that holds true however and something that we have seen throughout the heart of this pandemic last year is that the South African dream of owning your own home remains a core aspiration and it is where your roots are placed where you teach your child to write his bike for the first time where you create your memories and ultimately it's your safe haven. And ladies and gentlemen all of you here today continue to make the dreams of South Africans come through. So on behalf of EPSA, on behalf of EPSA KZDN a huge thank you to all of you for assisting us and partnering with us on this journey. We as EPSA Home Loans continue to aspire the nation continue to aspire to house the nation and shape the industry in a meaningful way. Thank you so much to Private Property for allowing me allowing me this platform on this virtual stage. Over to you Tracy. Thank you so much Vanusha. I was looking at some of the chats that came in while you were talking. Some people just saying hi. Becky from Durban in particular saying hi. We have one question. Thank you Vanusha for keeping time as well. Excellent job. I think we'll have we have two questions. Someone's asking what time does the event end today? We're aiming to end in an hour from now and then hopefully keep networking open for another 30 minutes. But the formal program we're pushing for it to be complete concluded by half past three today. And then Ken had a question. In a country plagued by planned service delivery failures such as load shedding which we're all kind of sitting on the edge of our seat hoping not to get hit. When when will banks start to get behind funding home owners who want solar power solutions installed at their properties? Great question there from Ken. Vanusha do you want to take a stab at answering that question? I'll put my microphone off and leave my camera. Sure no problem. We do actually have a division with an app that is our renewable energy division within our relationship banking structure. So we have already assisted customers with these solar energy panels. It's been quite successful in our every space as well in the Western Cape. We've had quite a bit of success. Ken I will post my my information onto the chat. So if you would want to contact me afterwards this is something that I could easily arrange a discussion for you with our team at our head office from the renewable energy side. I will gladly facilitate that for you. Thank you so much Vanusha. I'm going to let Vanusha get into the limo and go back to her table if there are no further questions. But thank you thank you so much for for spending this afternoon with us really really appreciated Vanusha. Thank you so much Tracy. Excellent right now let's have a little bit of fun for the next five minutes. I want you to take out your cellular devices and go to www.menti.com enter the code four five six two eight one three seven four five six two eight one three seven put in your name and then we'll get ready to answer some questions. And the point of this part of our program is to really get to know who's in the room in much more detail than we would have in the past if we were just having a physical event with you there. Let's enter your name enter the code into your name and then we can get ready for this set of questions. I see Carl van der Berg is already there my colleague Celeste is in already. Lee you're in too. Tremaine you're in Ken I see you're in Dana you're in let me see if there are any other questions nothing for now. Let's get a few more people in here. Tracy Dunn is asking for us to put the code in here studio on it. Did you check that studio is just literally on it like that well done studio. The code is four five six two eight one three seven four five six two eight one three seven. Leanne is asking what's the code again. It's in the chat four five six two eight one three seven. Thanks Google for helping us with that. All right I think we've got quite a number of people in already. If you're not in yet you'll catch us on the flip side. I think let's get ready studio to answer these questions. I want to try and get us through the program in good time because time is completely of the essence with these virtual events. That's what we found. So the first question is what is your job title or your role within your company? Where are you joining us from? There we go. A state agent mostly most of the people that are here are with us in their capacities as real estate agents or property professionals. There's a few others. I remember your head to your your other is also there. Few CEOs principal agent and managing broker studio. Let's go to the next question. The next question is my favorite question out of the series is do you multitask when attending virtual meetings or virtual events online? Yes I'm guilty. The second option is my mind does tend to wonder. The third option is no I'm 100 focus and then the fourth option is sometimes. So most of you saying between sometimes and yes I'm guilty. I think it probably also has to do with the content and my rights. Let's see if there's more responses coming through. Let's get to the next question. Hey Kay Rushtyn principal agent. Thank you Karen for letting us know Karen you multitasker. It's so difficult. We're doing 10 10 things at once. Here's another question in your opinion. Is it a buyer's or a seller's market? What do you think buyers or seller's market? Sasha and I see you doing 10 things at once 100 percent. That's that's exactly right for for me anyway. Personally I tend to you know be all over the place except when I'm when I'm hosting and I literally have to spend my 100 focus on you. So seller's market but the majority of you thinking that more it's more a buyer's market. There was a third proposal or proposal for a third option which was both and that came out this morning in this morning session. Let's get to the next question and then I'm going to ask my next speaker to start getting themselves ready in the next minute or so. We're going to bring on pay props to your head and Yan and I really encourage you to stick around for Yan's particular talk. He he has some very interesting information to share with you. Shoo that's the word that describes 2021. So if I'm not saying 2020 I'm saying 2021. Busy difficult and challenging amazing a roller coaster. But hopeful okay somebody said tequila. Please tell me in the chat what you mean by tequila. Yeah my goodness anything can happen. I think that speaks into that hopeful positive promising amazing challenging. Busy excellent crazy. Thank you so much for sharing your sentiment of 2021 so far. Let's go to the next question. If you think about the South African real estate industry right now what would it be? I know you had to think about that a little bit. But let's see some of those responses coming through. If you could change just one thing about the South African real estate industry right now. What would it be? Yep this commission percentage someone says more stock. Someone says compliance. Quite a few of you saying you would change the EAAB. Overpricing is one of the one of the comments there. Deeds offers to be more efficient of course. Quicker transfer times of course that's something that we hear often. Allow repairs in bond amount in the bond amount. Efficiency of rates department. More stock, prop tech, more stock and the EAAB. No show houses. Who said no show houses? Please put your comment in the chat and explain what you mean by no show houses. And there we have strictly do away with unqualified agents and introduce more of the interactions with EAAB. Let's go to the thank you everyone for giving us your opinion. For giving us your input, your feedback. I don't think there are any other questions here specific to the mentee component of this program. But I am going to bring up in fact we're going to take a short five minute break. And in this five minute break please switch on your camera. If you if you can switch on your microphone. If you can when you do that then everyone in your table is visible to you. If you don't switch on your camera and your microphone. You'll still be able to hear the conversation from the colleagues who have actually switched on their cameras. The other interesting thing about this particular platform is you can actually jump from table to table. So if you look at the the the letter inside the inside the circle on the table. It will tell you the name and surname of the of the participant or the delegate. And if they space at the table you'll be able to then connect. So I'm going to give let's studio let's come back in five minutes. And then we'll bring on pay prop your hit and young followed by our our private properties. Carl van der Berg and he will end the session or for us today in the next five minutes. I'll see you here. We are back. Awesome. Thank you studio. Welcome back everyone. Up next we have pay prop head of data and analytics. Your head Smith and Smuts and the CEO of pay prop Jan Davel will be taking us through the 2020 rental market in review and what the future holds. They'll also be giving us a sneak peek at the pay props in state of the rental market survey results before everyone else. So it's really very special studio. Let's bring other you are your head. Welcome. Welcome to the stage. Welcome Johan. Welcome Jan as well. We'll see you in a few minutes. Enjoy the session over to you. Thank you Tracy. And thanks again private property for hosting us. It's always fun to be part of your events and to share some of our knowledge and insight into the rental market with you. I'm going to share my screen now and then I'm going to switch off my video just so that you can just find the right screen. I'm going to switch off my video so that the presentation can be large enough on everyone's screens because there are quite a few graphs in there. All right, that is the right screen. As Tracy said, Jan and I will be chatting to you about the year in review. So that's my section. And then Jan will tell you a bit about what to expect in the future. So for today I'm going to chat to you about information from the rental index. I'll share the link in the chat in a bit and show the link at the end of this presentation. But we'll go through what happened with rent and rental growth, what happened to arrears, what does the credit matrix look like. And then as Tracy mentioned, the sneak peek of the state of the rental industry survey. But literally no one has seen yet except for the Nexus Group this morning. So I hope that you find it insightful. So starting off with the rental market. In this first graph we look at inflation, that's the blue line. And national rental growth, that's the red line. So what we measure here is year on year rental growth. And as you can see that has trailed below inflation for most of the past two years. That's the period that we're looking at here. You can also see that the red line, the rental growth line, has been trending downward for some time. And in November we saw negative rental growth here on year for the first time since we started the rental index back in 2012. So what this means is that between November 2019 and November 2020, the average rent amount that we see on paper actually became cheaper. Was only 10 Rand or 0.3% cheaper, but it was still an historic event. So there are quite a few factors that contribute to the rental growth being under immense pressure and I'll walk through them with you now. So there's always a demand side and a supply side with these things. And if we look at the demand side affordability is obviously, and not surprisingly, a huge factor in rental growth and the demand for rental properties. A lot of this is due to the fact that many tenants, many households lost their income or at least part of their income during lockdown. And they simply can't afford large rental increases. They aren't necessarily looking to move into a larger, more expensive property. So all of this puts downward pressure on price, the fact that there is low demand for rental properties at the moment. Then on the supply side, there are two factors at play here. We've seen and hear from many of our clients that many Airbnb properties due to lockdown and due to the ban on travel, many of these properties were standing empty. Those owners took them out of the shorter market and put them onto the long-term rental market and this flooded the rental market with rental properties. The other factor, of course, is due to the low interest rates that investors are buying properties, buy to let properties. And that is also obviously then going into the rental market and fueling the oversupply. So the low demand and the high supply, both of these put pressure on the rental prices. You don't see this changing in the coming year for the simple reason that both of these are quite inelastic over the short term and will take a while to change. Now, if we look at basically the same information, just quarterly instead of monthly for two years, and we add a trend line, you can clearly see that the rental growth is trending downward. For most of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, rental growth again measured year on year, trending between three and four percent. It's worth mentioning that a year or two prior to this graph, rental growth was at six or seven percent. So even before lockdown, rental growth was under pressure again due to weak economic circumstances of tenants in general. So if we now compare the average rental growth with KZN rental growth, you can see that the picture looks slightly different. At the beginning of 2019, KZN rental growth actually outperformed the national level by quite a bit that changed dramatically after lockdown. And in 2020, the last three quarters, there were three negative rental growth quarters at the end of 2020, meaning that year on year, rent is actually getting cheaper. Putting the province into perspective against the other provinces, you can see that KZN there is the third most expensive province in the country, even though we saw some negative rental growth in the previous slide. Five out of the nine provinces actually experienced negative rental growth in the last quarter of last year. Westin Cavesville remains the most expensive province and also the only one with an average rent of over 9,000 grand. Moving on to areas, and as can be expected, this was quite a topic over the last year since many tenants, like I mentioned already, either fully or partially lost their income and there was so much uncertainty around lockdown and how long it's going to last and when people can go back to work. And this is why we see what we see on this graph. So at the end of quarter one, it was announced that we'll be going into hard lockdown due to that many tenants stopped paying their rent in full and for that reason the percentage tenants in arrears jumped to almost 25 percent. That means that one in every four tenants were actually in arrears during the second quarter of 2020. That has now improved quite a bit to 20.9 percent. So we're not quite where we were before lockdown but we are luckily a long way off the 25 percent that we saw in the second quarter. Looking at the other arrears metric that we look at, we look at the average arrears percentage relative to rent. So we look at if someone is in arrears, how big is that arrears relative to his rent? And at the beginning of the year, last year, free lockdown, it was at just below 80 percent. That jumped up all the way to 105 percent in the third quarter and improved a bit in the last quarter to 96 percent. So both of these metrics are still not where they were before lockdown. And I think it's safe to say that they both peaked and they are recovering slowly. So why did we see the patterns that we did? So firstly, like I mentioned, if we looked at the number of tenants in arrears or the percentage of tenants in arrears, due to the uncertainty of lockdown and the cash flow, they simply stopped paying their rent in full. And then once it was announced that most people could go back to work on the 1st of June, they then again started paying their rent and where they could paid off their arrears. On the other side, if we look at the average arrears percentage, it's possible that this metric peaked in quarter three, mostly because tenants with low arrears who were able to clear their debt, if the tenants with low arrears disappears, then mathematically that average will increase a bit. So the remaining arrears is a bit more sticky. If you think about it for this figure to actually reduce, tenants will have to pay their rent in full every month and on top of that, pay off their arrears before that can improve and that in the current economic climate is quite difficult to do for many tenants. Then if we compare quasi-lunatile arrears with the national, you can see if we look at the percentage of tenants in arrears that KZN started on 21.7%, so above the national average of 19.4%. Also peaked in quarter two and then that recovered to 23%. Still above the starting point in quarter one and also above the national average of 20.9% at the end of last year. On the average arrears percentage, there is actually some good news. KZN looks a bit better than the national average, starting the year on 75%, moving up to just over one month's rent. The average arrears and then that declined back to 91% at the end of the year, so that at least is below the national average. Then third, we'll look at credit metrics. So just a quick explanation where these figures come from. Through the paper platform, our clients can do credit checks on prospective tenants and these credit metrics are then pooled to give you the data that you see. So it doesn't necessarily track tenants in the system, rather it indicates that the credit profile of someone who is applying for a rental property, so they're not necessarily the same group. So just keep that in mind. So if we speak of credit metrics, we take quite a few metrics into account. We look at income, income growth. We look at how many tenants have a major delinquency against their name, so that the notices, defaults could be an account in arrears of more than three months. So there are quite a few criteria there. Then we look at how much of your income do you spend on debt? That's your net income after tax. How much of your income do you spend on rent? The sum of those two give you affordability, so what is left after you pay your debt and rent gives you disposable income. And then lastly, we have the credit score, which is just the overall score indicating credit health. So if we look at these national credit metrics, you can see that there was a bit of a decline in some of these, for example, major delinquencies during the second quarter, just off the lockdown, but you can also see that most of these actually improved again to the end of the year. Just one interesting one to mention is the debt-to-income ratio. We know that interest rates last year dropped by three and a half percentage points, and you can see as this debt-to-income ratio drops the what effect that lower interest rate actually had on the tenants' pocket. Now, if we look at the credit metrics of KZN versus nationally, and I'm going to stand still here for too long, I just want to show you more or less where the province, how the province feed against the national figures. So KZN had higher income than national. This was actually the second highest income out of all the provinces after the Western Cape. Income growth was slightly lower than national income. The national, here's some good news, fewer delinquent tenants, lower debt-to-income ratio, which is also great. KZN tenants spent slightly more on the rent as a percentage of their income, and better affordability, but very much in line with the national average. Better affordability also means that they had a larger percentage of their income left after the rent and debt payments. Lastly, if you look at the credit score, at 643 KZN, two points lower than the national, but worth noting that it is higher than it was at the beginning of 2020. So why do we see improvements in some of these metrics? It's very possible that lower income tenants, so we know that lower income tenants were hit harder by lockdown, and it's possible that these tenants lost their income and then moved completely out of the rental market when they moved with family or friends, so they exited the market in the short term. That's why they're not applying and bringing the averages down. It could also just be that tenants are staying longer because they can't necessarily afford more expensive properties, and because they are staying longer and not applying for new properties, people don't necessarily do credit checks on these tenants. A few other possibilities is that maybe after the financial hardship of 2020 and lockdown, tenants realized that they don't need to spend so much money on booze and restaurants and entertainment, and they could possibly be thinking about their finances in a more responsible way and maybe using that booze money to pay off some of their debt, which would be great. The lower interest rate obviously had an effect on the debt-to-income ratio and also brought that ratio down. And then lastly, I said we were expecting credit metrics to worsen, and I'm really glad that we didn't see that because with the low interest rates, many good tenants now actually have the opportunity to buy their own property instead of renting. So I was expecting these good tenants to leave the market, the rental market permanently, but as you can see from our stats, they actually are still good tenants out there, so that is a bit of good news for you. Then for the funnest part, the state of the rental industry survey, we did the first survey a year ago and then at the end of last year, did one again. So I just want to highlight a few of the findings for you here. 95% of people who took part worked in the property industry, as you can expect. Almost 70% were either business owners or rental agents and then 64% had smallish rental books, so at least 150 properties. First category, we looked at technology. It's not surprisingly 55% of respondents said that the use of technology in their business increased during COVID. That should come as no surprise to anyone. Then 70% said that virtual viewings and 3D tours are here to stay and I must say personally, I've seen many, many good virtual tours and 3D tours, so this technology is available and this is a possibility for this to stay. And then lastly, 69% said on productivity, it is more productive to increase automation than to increase the workforce. That is basically working smarter and not harder. Then looking at the rental portfolio in general, 70% of people said that the rental increases that they put through in the last year was lower than normal. This was quite a shopping one for me. 93% of respondents said that they actually made payments arrangements with tenants, which indicates just how many tenants actually lost at least a part of their income during COVID. 55% said that they see more vacant properties now than they did a year ago. And 64% said that they have lower income. They have lowered their commission during the year in order to keep a landlord. So this is a bit of a problematic number just because commission income is your main income in any rental business and once you've lowered that percentage, it is quite difficult to get a landlord to pay a higher percentage commission going forward. Then looking at challenges, 51% of respondents said that their single biggest challenge is to find good tenants. And 86% said that their biggest worry for 2020 is the ongoing effect of COVID. Lastly, and I'll end on some good news. The last question of the server was how optimistic are you about the future of the rental market? Only 5% were pessimistic about this. 17% said they were neutral. And then a whopping 78% said that they were actually optimistic about the future of the rental market. I looked at the previous year's server results and only 62% of people said they were optimistic about the rental market. So maybe COVID made everyone think a little differently about their businesses. That is all from me. If you want more information about rent areas, credit matrix, and some other cool stuff, you can download the rental index. I'll drop this link in the chat as well. Thank you. I'm going to hand it over to Jan now. Thank you, Yvette. And good afternoon, everybody. I've got a bit of a distortion. Yvette, can I ask you to switch your camera off, please? Thank you. Well, good afternoon, everybody. It is absolutely our privilege and our pleasure to participate in this exciting event. So a special word of thank you to Amasi, Tracy Lee, Col, Ben, the rest of the team at Private Property for allowing us this exceptional opportunity. And thank you, Yvette, for all your insights. Ladies and gentlemen, for today, I'm not going to be doing a presentation like Yvette has done. I think should I have done that, I should have titled that Death by PowerPoint because today I am going to look at something else that is a little uncertain, just like the economy and the rental yields, etc. And that is the Property Practitioners Act and more specifically the regulations to it that we are not 100% sure when those are going to be published or promulgated. As you all know, the Property Practitioners Act, the act itself was promulgated or published on 3 October 2019 already. That being the case, you may be wondering why we as estate agents are still working in accordance with the Old Estate Agency Affairs Act of 1976. I think we all agree that this 45-year-old piece of legislation is overdue for replacement as it dates back to an era before the internet, before digital marketing, social media, and very importantly, also before automated and integrated payment platforms such as PIPRO. The old act simply does not cater for today's realities, but considering the new Property Practitioners Act, we must remember that this act in itself only sets out broad principles of the new law and it does not speak to implementation thereof. And that is where the regulations to an act come in. It sets out the implementation and the application of the act once it's been promulgated. Now, although the act was published in October 2019, the regulations have not been finalized or published yet, but we know that it's coming. Once it has been published in the government cassette, the act will be implemented and we'll all be working in accordance with the new Property Practitioners Act. When is that likely to be? Well, we don't know, but we do know what the final draft regulations state. And without further ado, I'm going to share my screen. I just want to show you certain extracts of the act. And if I can share this, and I'm not going to read it at verbatim, it will be too time consuming, but let me just point you to a few clauses. Share, there we go. And firstly, I want to show you Section 54 of the Property Practitioners Act. That is where we learn what the intention of the legislature is. Now, most of you or probably all of you will be familiar with Section 32 of the State Agency Affairs Act that deals with trust accounts. Section 54 of the new act is very similar, slightly more detailed, but it still says that every Property Practitioner must open and keep one or more set of trust accounts. You must appoint an auditor. You must notify the authority, which is the EAAB. It will have a name. It's going to be referred to as the authority that you need to notify them of things. And then they all mean it must do's and must do's. It's in different languages, so I'm just going to skip a page. And the Property Practitioner must do this and must do that. And it's not different, not very different, very much different to what you are used to. What is, however, very different in this new act is to be found in an earlier article or section. And I'm going to jump to section 23 of the same act. So 54 deals with the old provisions as was depicted, as were depicted in section 32 of the old act. 54 replies those. But then section 23 earlier up in the act needs to be considered. And that makes mention of certain exemptions in respect of accounting records and trust accounts. Now, when we consider this, and it starts off a little awkwardly saying that a Property Practitioner who's turnover is below 2.5 million grand must cause his or her or its accounting records to be subjected to an independent review or a registered accountant subject to certain provisions. Now, that is materially different to the current situation where every Property Practitioner or every estate agent must have a trust account and it must be audited by an accredited auditor. So already we can see that something is different here. In reading subsection 2, 23.2, sub 2, the minister may by notice in the Gazette determine circumstances under which certain Property Practitioners may be exempted from keeping trust accounts. And the minister may by notice in the Government Gazette determine a different dispensation for the review of accounting records for those Property Practitioners. So section 23, we can see that the intention of the legislator is that certain estate agencies can be exempted from firstly having trust accounts and secondly, then they don't have to have their accounts audited but they can only have it independently reviewed by a registered accountant. Why is that important? Obviously costs, time and lots of administration that you're going to get paid for. So I'm not trying to give legal advice, I'm simply pointing out in the Act that has already been published, there is an indication that the intention of the legislator is to exempt certain agencies from keeping trust accounts and having them audited. Now that was the intention. So in the draft regulations that were published in 2020, this is where we will find the details and I'm jumping to that, this is published, it's available on the internet. Section 4, or it's actually regulation 4 to the Property Practitioners Act that deals with exemptions. And in these regulations or draft regulations, we can also find the template documents that one has to complete in order to follow a pre-scribed procedure when you want to apply for the exemption from keeping trust accounts and having it audited. Now this is quite comprehensive, I just want to show you that it actually exists and you will now know where to find it. Specifically look at the contents of draft regulation 4, more specifically 4.4 and I'll scroll to it now and that has to be read with sections 54 and 23 of the Act where the intention is clear. But let's have a look at these regulations. So it says, pursuant to the provisions of section 23, the following is prescribed. A Property Practitioner is exempted from keeping a trust account if we meet certain conditions and there are quite a few, I'm not going to stand still on the details of those but it's all reasonable, it all makes common sense and if you have followed all those it's pretty much the contents of section 23 and 54 which I showed you earlier. Then subject to that you can be exempted and if you are exempted in terms of this regulation 4.1.1 above provided that certain other things are in place you as a Property Practitioner will not be required to again have an account review or audit it. Regulation 4.3 says where a Property Practitioner is exempted in terms of the above and has complied with certain other things such Property Practitioner will be exempted from having to have his business and other accounts audited and will only be required to have such account independently viewed by a registered accountant. No longer an auditor no longer a formal audit far less time consuming massive cost saving opportunities subject to you meeting the criteria. Now an estate agency has to be otherwise compliant and all these procedures need to be followed. I don't want to give a legal lecture on that please obtain the legal advice make sure that your auditors are aware of it and then consider the most important aspects which are to be found in subsection 4.4. And that says that a Property Practitioner will further be exempted so the further probably relates to the fact that you have a dormant account or that your income is less than 2.5 million rent per annum. So if you are bigger if you run a biggest agency you might further be exempted from operating a trust account if you are otherwise compliant and then subject to Regulation 4.4 which says that you may apply for exemption if you have mandated one or more other Property Practitioners that specialise in collecting and distributing trust payments. Such Property Practitioners will be called Payment Processing Agents and that is a company like PayProp to process your trust payments on your behalf in respect of all trust funds received by you. So should you use a Property Practitioner PayProp is a Property Practitioner that is an accredited Payment Processing Agency you can apply for exemption from keeping your own trust account but there are further requirements looking at 4.4.2 your Payment Processing Agent in other words your service provider like PayProp has to operate a trust environment itself and it has to be an agency and it has to operate a trust environment that also complies with all this act and all the associated regulations. Then 4.4.3 if I scroll that up each Payment Processing Agent that is your PayProp time of service provider mandated by you must operate within a trust environment separately auditable client accounts both in respect of each Property Practitioner in other words each estate agency to which provides a service and in respect of each client of each such Property Practitioner. So we're talking a trust environment by your Payment Processer an entire environment that is auditable as a whole then we're talking about separately auditable client accounts in other words for each agency such as yours and then we're talking auditable client accounts for each landlord and each tenant. Segregation of funds is what we're talking of here and then lastly the trust environment and each of these separate accounts needs to be audited annually in compliance with the act and the regulations and if all those criteria are met an agency can apply for exemption which will lead to time and cost savings. I'm delighted to say that PayProp has been in compliance with this for the last 16 years even before these regulations were drafted I'm going to stop sharing quickly and what is important I think it's a little good news amidst all the other uncertainties and although it's still uncertain when these regulations are going to bring the act into operation I think there's a lot of relief for smaller estate agencies startup agencies and those agencies who have been using fully compliant property payment processes such as PayProp and I think that is a bit of good news in all the uncertainty that's around us cost saving opportunity safe auditable trust environment with proper audit trials assistance with your audit and hopefully that will assist many agencies amidst these difficult working conditions thank you Tricelli I think that's it from me Ach, thank you so much Yan for taking us through the act let me know in the chat if you found some of what Yan was sharing this afternoon useful okay so Tanda Zile said that she had a problem she can't hear or see or he can't hear or see please accept my apologies if I get it wrong Yan there are a few questions here but I believe your head is answering directly I would like to thank you so much for your time and wish you a wonderful afternoon we'll connect again tomorrow morning and for the rest of the week while we bring these nexus events to the industry thank you again for your time thank you so much have a good afternoon awesome okay and so there was a question that received already six votes it's from Soli Soli asked what advice would you give a first-time property investor so I'm going to ask that my colleague Carl van den Berg who is the private property business development executive he's going to come on to the stage and he's going to give us a glimpse into what the future holds for private property and as well as what true industry partnership might look like going forward so while we that question that Soli's asked what advice would you like what advice would you give a first-time property investor I'm going to open that question up to everyone in the chat what advice would you give a first-time property investor please put your chat or put your responses in the chat and then Carl over to you thank you Tracey Lee and hello to our extended private property family it's an absolute pleasure today to be able to to spend some time with you we obviously are an organization that's very used to the physical world and interacting with yourself so we've absolutely missed talking to you guys so this is why we've done an excess in short so thank you again for everybody for joining us thanks Vanucia from EBSA and our banking strategic partner as well as Jan and your head from from PayPal it's a lot of information that we've shared today I'm hoping that everyone's taken some notes and today I'm going to be covering really property where private property is currently and where it is that we're going and then I'm going to ask Celeste to join us and she's going to really run down what it is that we're seeing in a KZM perspective those of you that don't know Celeste she's our provincial head and looks after KZM Godroot, Eastern Cape and Deflaystot so let's get cracking so who is private property and what are we choosing so essentially we're choosing to be a trusted partner in the real estate ecosystem so what do we mean by real estate ecosystem it's really quite simple because on the one side you've got consumers and those are the people that are looking for properties whether it's to rent or to buy and on the other side you've got our partners our partners are property practitioners banks, mortgage originators and the likes so this is a an interesting place to be and we sort of do all quite a bit of a tightrope because we need to balance the needs of both the consumer as well as as a client and if we start sort of leaning more to one side so as an example if we start leaning a little bit more to what real estate needs or what real estate wants we run the risk of alienating our consumers and there's 57 million of these people that we can engage with and so what happens is your consumer really just starts voting with their feet and that they find other avenues to get their information and to do their property purchasing and it's like I was on the other side so if we listen a little bit too much to consumers we run the risk of alienating our clients so it's a bit of a balancing act but we choose to do this and it's a really really good place for us to be we've been in this business 22 years but what thing we know is what the way business was done 22 years ago the way business was done a year ago is fundamentally different to the way it is now so if we have a look at at the next slide we start talking around how is it that we're going to be a trusted partner and it's really quite simple it's we choose to be customer obsessed and customers again are consumer and our clients we need to know our clients and our consumers incredibly well what are their needs what are their pain points once you understand that you can start solving real problems and we're choosing to go on this journey it's a fundamental shift to what we've always done and we're essentially going to move away from being a sold consumer and clients problems through digital solutions that's the snapshot of it once you understand the first two then you start creating valuable compositions and that's really the root that we're going to where are we now well right now we are currently averaging 3.2 million consumers every month a year ago we were averaging 2 million 24 months ago we were averaging only a million people and our five year ambition is to hit the five million mark and we were well ahead of that so we're incredibly proud of what it is that we've been able to do in a fairly short amount of time to bring more people onto our portal that chooses private property to look at your properties and we've done that through a few things one of them is our social media activity you would have remembered when we rebanded a year ago that we went really really big into social media we do several podcasts a week and we've got almost 700,000 people engaged where are we in this five year strategy 2019 was really around us preparing around what is this new pilot property going to look like we're pretty much a brand new team at an exact level and it was really our time just to figure out what is it that we're going to do for our property and our clients a lot last year was a big year besides COVID we also started March or started the year with a complete rebrand I don't know if anybody's noticed but we no longer the red reds blue and white colors of the past we know green it's more than just a rebrand and how does that we look it's also how does that we show it how do we communicate what products and services do do we give to our clients and our consumers 2021 is a watershed year for pilot property it is the year of innovation it is the year of digital change and it's the year that we've been planning for the last 18 months around it so we're in a cusp of really being able to revolutionize what it is that we do for real estate and I'll share a little bit of that now as you can see the next slide I can't even remember being those colors anymore we are very much a new pilot property with a new way of doing things it's taken a lot of people by surprise in terms of how does that we've changed and everybody that I think we're frozen a little bit here lost sound and picture Carl are you there studio do we give Carl a few minutes or ask him to refresh possibly or while we wait for Carl can we maybe bring Celeste onto the stage I believe Carl van der Berg is frozen Carl needs to sneeze thank you Ken let's give Carl a moment of course in the meantime while we bring Carl back on good one good one Ken there we go Celeste welcome back welcome to this afternoon's next session your microphone as I think on mute or is it not are you you okay I still can't hear I can absolutely hear you let's give Carl a couple of minutes to log in and log out and log back in again but in the meantime if you can just take us through the case it in you know what's happening in case it in from a portal point of view perfect so while Estes get well Estes getting those slides getting to those slides I'll get onto that now so I just first of all thank you Tracy for introducing me and good afternoon to everybody in case it in it's absolutely awesome for us to be able to connect with you after there's a very long dry spell of not being able to connect what I'm wanting to do this afternoon is go through the performance the performance for the region I just have a disclaimer these are the performance results for the entire region okay and we just need to be mindful of that what I'm going to encourage you to do is when we are done with the presentation and you are wanting to possibly drill down a little bit deeper into your specific area of operation that you get in touch with your relationship manager and we set up a meeting to connect with you and that and we will be able to go through data that is more specific to your area of operation so I just wanted to set that up up front because we know KwaZulu Natal the Kingdom of the Zulu is a huge region so this is a general overview for the performance for the region okay so what I'm going to do is because there are many graphs and slides I'm going to turn my camera off at this point just so that you can get a bigger picture of the slides and I promise I will be back as soon as I've done but you will be able to hear me okay all right so the first slide that we're going to have a look at is the sales performance for KwaZulu Natal for the period 2020 and 2018 up to 2021 up to and including February 2021 as you can see there has been an exceptionally positive growth in the views and leads for the portal from a sales performance perspective this in spite of a 5% drop-off in the January-February timeframe for 2021 and against 2020 of the previous year so again we seeing really positive results in the sales performance sales listing performance sector with I mean for views we've increased by 37% already for the new year and 16% in terms of leads right moving into the rental space the picture is a little bit different and despite an increase in the number of listings and views we still we still are seeing a decline or a negative sentiment with regards to leads now it is not as great as it is in some regions but it is still a negative however in saying that it is indicative of the market in general when it comes to to rental listing performance okay what we are going to have a look at now is the top 50 searched suburbs for sales in Cozillunatel okay and it's interesting to note that a large percentage of these searches I know Venusia alluded to it earlier on and it's interesting when we listen to our colleagues and the the data that they present if we have to overlay it it almost speaks to each other it would speak to each other so as Venusia alluded to it is interesting to note that a large percentage of these searches are for the coastal properties could this be suggestive of immigration and the move that allows you to work and do life where and when you choose or how you choose we don't it seems so so very interesting it's interesting to see that these coastal regions are fetching a lot more interest in terms of searches looking at the rental space also for the top 50 for Cozillunatel again lot of coastal properties and very much your central convenient points yes great start in Venusia and so yeah again as I said as as a caveat when I started this is a general overview of the statistics or the data or the performance overview that we've seen for the region as a whole I would love to be able to come and sit with each of you who in your area of operation and dive a little bit deeper into what is happening in these specific areas as they reflect on the top 50 searches what we are also seeing is in terms of in the next slide we'll see the median listing prices over from January 2018 right through to January February 2021 you will see that from a sales perspective case it in is tracking above the national average and with a and we've actually seen a 5% growth year on year for the period January and February 2021 against January and February 2020 which is encouraging and from a rental perspective even though there's been a slight decline in terms of the the median listing price it is still tracking above the national average and we are findings were that for the period January February 2021 against 2020 there was a decline of 9% in the median listing price for rentals yes I look forward to seeing you Ken then lastly that's pretty much what we have to share today I just wanted to take the opportunity from my team at private property and the greater team at private property to thank you for your continued support we would not be able to have had achieved these phenomenal results without your support and despite the COVID-19 pandemic and what it has done to many of us I am still optimistic I'm a glass half full kind of gal you know when Venucia said in her presentation strike while the iron is hot let me put my camera on my hand got very hot because I entered this industry and this markets at a time when interest rates were 24% times are very different but very much the same it's you know we asked that question in Nancy what is 2021 and yes it is tough but you know what we are tougher so optimistic I look forward to meeting you all face to face soon in the near future take care and stay safe I hope Coll is okay to come back on I think he is thank you so much Celeste thank you for your awesome thank you presentation thank you Cole what happened there were you what happened there I'm back I'm back I suppose that was the equivalent of falling off stage in a real life presentation so apologies but I seem to be back I'll keep my camera off for the time being let's see how I can recover from that but let's I think he says that's the slide I lost my mind speaking to you really I suppose the point is this is consumers are completely change how it is that they engage with property how they learn about property how it is that they view property all the way through to purchasing it we know and it was mentioned I think by your head earlier on there's a big drive around consumers wanting to see virtual reality Matterport and all the rest of that and really that's about creating efficiency so have a look at the property research the property understand if it's going to fit the needs and then go through to the real estate agent which bodes well right because I mean I know a day in a life of real estate agents if you do a new listing and you get 500 leads in a day how are you ever going to get through it and our goal really from PowerProperty is how do we give you guys the tools to really be able to understand this and separate a shopper from a buyer and then really just talks to around building a modern platform so you're going to see us in the next couple of months I said 2021 is our watershed year and it's our year of absolute technology and being able to do a lot of things quite differently so in a couple of months time we're going to be going live with two new sort of digital platforms one that is purely based for consumers so in other words those people that are shopping and wanting to buy property or rent property they're going to have a completely different app as well as web where they can engage with your property search your property's find information and connect with real estate agents and the next level of that is a client portal and that's for yourselves and that is a better way for you guys to interact with PowerProperty how do you understand the trends like what Celestin and our other partners have been sharing with you today how do you access that information how do you understand your market share how do you understand the sales prices in certain areas so that's what we're going to be developing in the next couple of months we're incredibly excited about this and it's something that's really really going to create a huge amount of efficiencies for both yourselves and ourselves so really really looking forward to it an example that we had from the Nexus this morning is how is it that we can link a qualified buyer to a real estate agent you know imagine the power that you would have as a real estate agent that when somebody comes to you and says I want to view that property that you know that they've really got a pre-approval from AppServe that you know exactly which house they're looking to buy and which area they're looking to buy and do they have 2.5 children and a dog and a cat and that's really what it is that PowerProperty is striving to get to get to yourselves we'll obviously share a lot more information around this because there's going to be a bit of change management and we'll build this new portal in this new industry together so we're incredibly excited about it the last point is this is you know we talk about digital technologies we talk around and we often use the word disruption and I fear that destruction has gotten a really really bad name to it so a lot of people view disruption as sort of cutting out the middle man or in our case you know going directly and linking buyers and sellers to get directly together and cutting out the real estate agent or less than the next thing that is an element to disruption PowerProperty sees it very very different so there's a couple things that we know one property ownership in our country is highly emotive it's the second it's the biggest thing that anybody is ever going to purchase in their lives and there is always going to be a place for the human being in it and the human being is yourselves what we need to use with technology is again giving you guys efficiency for understanding the problems that you have and giving you the solutions and that's really the journey that PowerProperty will be going with yourselves in the next couple weeks well the next couple months until we really get to that place with that that we've got actually efficiency so thank you again for for joining us today I hope that's this was quite informative I hope we I'm still online and everybody can still hear me I'll come back on to the stage and if there's any further questions we'll happily answer it thank you so much Carl I think let's put your microphone on mute while we scroll through our chat box and see if there are any questions for Carl specifically around his presentation today and I think Celeste you've already engaged in this chat box here and dropped your email address so that anyone on the call right now you're more than welcome to reach out to Celeste and she'll be happy to take you through the specifics of your area and that could be a 20-30 minute conversation but having that opportunity and wanting to use as much information and insight to help guide buyers and sellers and investors I think that's really the the sort of that's what partnership really means for private property so I'm gonna quickly read through some advice here I did put one of our questions that we had been asked which was what advice would you give a first-time property investor and we've got a couple of responses here I think Templeton you offered your advice as well and then Tracy Dunn advice know what you're wanting out of the property e.g. is it a rental income and then Ken you've also given us some of your some of oh yeah heads up for the presentation I'm not sure if it's the same for everyone your audio cuts out temporarily when you swap large to thumbnail video in fact we've actually taken video off completely because of the impact that it has on the network so thank you so much for that I think Solly we've taken a stab at answering your questions you're more than welcome to stay on and network further with us here today Thea you asked I know Thea's not in the room right now but she asked or he asked if we could send a copy of the presentation I believe your head you've already done that your head I also believe that you've already sort of answered why potentially the KZED market is so expensive in terms of rentals I believe that you've done that answer that question I think for the last few minutes of this presentation I'm going to end it off with another mentee if you're still in the room please take out your cellular phone go to mentee.com enter in the code and put in your name and then we'll quickly run through I think it's only a few questions here but it's really good for us to just get that get that insight from you while we have you in the room with 92 people still in this meeting today in this nexus today I think let's spend two three more minutes quickly just looking at mentee studio thank you for dropping it into the chat that code again is 45628137 all good for those that had to unfortunately drop off but like we said before this presentation will be made available please bear in mind that nexus will run until Thursday we will only be able to send out those presentations once nexus have been this nexus have been concluded which is Thursday so let's get into mentee right now and at the end of mentee I will announce the winner of the most engaged person and the best question hashtag you'll be at the edge of your seat for that one all right studio let's get into mentee and let's answer those questions we're just waiting for mentee Immanuel you've dropped is that your okay thank you we'll wait for Thursday so I can explain to colleagues okay which part of the country new buyers are investing in the most that's a question from Solomon let me see if there's anyone perhaps can can can someone one of our guests answer that question which part of the country are new buyers investing in the most let's see if there's someone in the in the in the meeting here that will be able to answer that question studios informed that we're just waiting for mentee let's give it a couple more minutes oh Immanuel that's your advice for first time investors property investors all right we'll click on that let's see all right how long do you think the rental market will will take to recover of course we've just heard the presentation by pay prop one to two years is the overwhelming sentiment longer than two years and less than two years those were the options but by far one to two years is what the consensus in the room is around how long it will take for the rental market to recover let's move on to the next question please studio we still have quite a number of people in the room are you experiencing an oversupply of rental properties in your area and not applicable there was a no there's okay there's quite a number of no's and let's give it a few more minutes Leanne I see your comment here we have seen an increase in sales in the belito area that's from our sides chas everett's everett's case that in north coast also an influx of inquiries okay so 18 of you saying that you've not experienced an oversupply of rental properties in your area it's very interesting let's move on to the next question and then we will end the session today and give you an opportunity to connect venusia thank you venusia from apsa she has given us a response to the question that salman salman posed and she says it will be region specific first time home buyers in kzden have a keen interest in the cbd precinct as well as our coastal areas is it harder to find good tenants since covid hit 13 of you saying yes no almost like nine of you saying no and again one person saying not applicable let's move on to the final set of questions now what what are the most important aspects to your business right now is it signing mandates is it expanding your brand with more franchises is it building your leads list or is it building brand awareness and look at that immediate responses telling us that signing mandates and building brand awareness seems to be the most important aspects that you're focusing on in your business at the moment let's give it a few more minutes and then move on to the next question and of course while I have you here I just wanted to say thank you so so much for engaging with us on these private property nexus events that we have put together with a specific focus with into your regions stock stock stock stock everybody that's what ken is saying let's see if we've got another mentee question once covid-19 passes will you be going back to the office yes no wow look at that there's a yes there's a stronger quite a few yeses coming through bit of uncertainty as well as one can imagine I think for us from a private property perspective we have made the decision to remote work until we are able to possibly even moving to smaller satellite offices around the country but for now safety first right and overwhelming majority of you saying you'll be going back to the office I must say I do miss seeing my colleagues every day I miss the chats at the at the water fountain let's go to the next question for mentee it's a bit of a question just will you will you will you be getting the vaccine once the vaccine have been okay look at that very very interesting a lot of people still haven't decided but yeah I think I fall into that haven't decided category let's see how how how the whole thing works out but quite a number of you already deciding it's a no yeah let's move on to the next question and we're almost getting to the end of this Monday afternoon edition of private property nexus in partnership with apse bank and specifically with a focus on quasi-lunatel how do you expect COVID-19 to impact your earnings this year majority of you saying more income some saying less income and others letting us know that you anticipate almost the same income or no impact thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us we really appreciated Emmanuel I see your comments just come in a lot of businesses have realized a massive saving by working from home cutting out the huge rental expenses from prior to COVID prior to COVID and then the final question I believe studio let's wrap it up here in the event of a third wave should there be a third wave what would you do differently to minimize the impact on you or your business as much as possible and the options were I think the options are wrong for this particular okay less income more income some income or no impact okay what would you do differently okay so you so I'm going to assume then that having more income will buffer you against the impact of a potential third wave or any other wave I think that's it that brings us to the end of the private property Nexus in partnership with Apsa I'd like to thank the speakers who joined us today Venusha thank you so much for your energy and your time thank you as well to your head and Jan and of course Carl and Celeste for joining me on this virtual stage today I'd also like to end by saying that Carl Alban you have our best question prize and then Templeton Massinga you win the prize for most engaged today someone from our team will be reaching out to the both of you just to say thank you I want to thank you Adina Swannapool thank you Tracy Dan thank you so much for your comments and thank you for participating in this private property Nexus I hope next time we can switch a lot more of the cameras on bring you up on the stage have more conversation tell us what you think maybe if you can just drop a green heart here in the chat box we'd really really appreciate it thank you so much for your time studio we are leaving the session open for the next 20 minutes so that you can so that our guests can still network and communicate and converse with each other remember if you want to move from table to table you're more than welcome to do so and then the final two links that we're going to put in the chat now the first one is the link for you to get your one and a half non verifiable CPD points from Aisa thank you Aisa let's paste that into into the chat box and then if you don't subscribe to our newsletter currently we have an industry newsletter we have lots of interesting information that comes through from the different brands and also what you know interesting things we're doing on agent connect on the Facebook page there we often run webinars we are very very keen to stay connected to you like Carl was saying so I'd like to thank you very very much for your time thank you for your effort thank you for your energy I think we did pretty good for a Monday afternoon have a wonderful rest of your week and hopefully we'll get to connect again soon bye bye everyone