 Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. You caught me looking at my watch there. It's 10 o'clock in the morning and it is our nexus specifically for the Cape Town Metro Atlantic Seaboard, Northern and Southern suburbs and South Peninsula area. In partnership with Apsa, I'd like to say good morning to you. Good morning, Kobe. Good morning, Eunice Rodriguez, Eliza or Elise Leroux. Thank you so much for joining us from Expello. Good morning, Lynette. And thank you for letting us know that you're from Rawson, Moulinatun. Hello, hello, hello. We are more of your head. I'm very happy to have you with us yet again. Morning, Mohammed. If you can see me, let me have a quick hello. Drop an emoji. Let me see. Good morning, your head. Thank you. You're always like the first one out of the mark there. Good morning. Good morning, Kim Miller. We already have 71 people on this call. This is going to be one of our biggest nexus yet. So we're really, really looking forward to having the session with you today. Good morning from Durbanville in Cape Town. We are more of Julian. Morning, Felene. Thank you for saying my whole name. Good morning. Good morning, Jan. Good to have you back with us. Good morning, Nerissa. Huia mora, huia mora, huia mora. I think let us give ourselves a minute or so and let everyone settle in. Good morning, Gemma. I see you there. Good morning, Hendrina. Good morning, Hendry. Good morning, Vilma. Good morning, Letitia. Cameron. Good morning. And then Lynette. Good morning from Beach Road Properties in Malpostran. I love that. I just love everything about the Western Cape. I love everything about Cape Town. I'm actually from Cape Town. So I'm a little bit biased. Good morning, Jennifer. Good morning, Jill. Good morning, Leslie. Is anyone here from the rest of the country? Because, you know, with good morning, Dear Dre, with the internet, we're able to connect from wherever. On our first nexus on Monday, we actually had somebody connecting all the way from the UK. Good morning, Janine Panika. Good morning, Sidri. Nice to see you. Good morning, Natasha. All right. I think that's about a minute in. So let me do my greeting and let's get the show on the road. Of course, today is a really, really special day for us here at Private Property. And when I get to the part where I explain what these buttons on the side here do, then I'm going to pop in a question there for you. And I'm going to ask you if you know why today is like super us here at Private Property. So my name is Tracy Lee Millen. I'm the brand and marketing executive here at Private Property. And I'm going to be your virtual host for this morning session. The word nexus means a series of connections that link to or more things or ideas. And that is exactly what these nexus events are all about. It's a series of digital networking events which cultivates human connection through knowledge sharing and networking. Our first nexus was hosted last year in November and it was incredibly well received by the industry. So we decided we're going to bring it back, but we're going to do it differently. We're going to focus on specific regions and bring insights that are specifically relevant to those regions. So they are hyper relevant to you in your area, giving you the best possible chance of achieving success even in this tough, tough market. Have you been part of the nexus series? We started on Monday. Tomorrow's our last nexus. And I'm telling you now we've had so much fun. I don't think we're going to stop doing these connection series. I'd like to also thank our partners APSA and also PayProp because they are part of our speaker lineup today and because they can see the power of partnership and the power of connection. So before we get started, I want to take you through the environment, this platform that we are on. It's a very simple platform and it's built for engagement. It's built for us to be able to engage with each other. So right here on the right of your screen, you'll see the word chat. And in that chat, I'm going to ask you to drop an emoji that represents how you feel right at this minute. I'm going to drop a heart that is green because obviously my heart is green. So please, if you can, thank you, Carl. Thank you for lean. I see you dropping that emoji. It can be any color. It can be anything. It's an emoji that represents how you feel right now. Dion, you feel like a ghost. Yo, Lynette, I like the sunglasses. Someone feels like an alien. Who's that? Louise, like an alien. Vicky, hi. You've got a smiley face. I love that. Thank you, guys. Thank you for keeping the energy up in this room just because we can't see each other doesn't mean that we are not connected. We are not connecting through the screen right now. Right next to the chat button, you can see a participant's button. If there's someone that asks a question and then you think you may have the answer to that question, or if there's someone that you've been meaning to connect with, or someone who you've had an interest in having a conversation with, you can hang your cursor over the message icon there and message that person directly. This is a platform that enables direct communication. So I can even see all the names there in alphabetical order, and it's really built for connection. The button next to it is called, is the Q&A button, and if I click on that Q&A button, here's the question I'm going to ask you. Why is today so special for private property? I'm going to ask that question, and I'm not going to ask anonymously. If you ask, it asks whether you want to ask this question anonymously. I'm not. So you'll see my name when I ask that question. Somebody already upvoted that question. Three votes, four votes, five votes, six votes. If I get to 10 votes, then I will give the answer. If you know the answer, go to your chat box and then you tell us what you think it is. Please, private property people do not answer the question because that would be cheating. So once a question is upvoted, all right, I see it's gotten to 11 votes, 12 votes, I will tell you. Yes, it's in Patrick's Day, but it's also the day where we decided, it's on this day that we decided that we are going to change the way we look, the way we are, the way we speak, and the way we think of connection. So this is the day that we changed from the red, white, and the blue into the green. I'm not going to bore you with too much of that stuff, but for us, I just want to say it is an incredibly exciting day. It's an incredibly rewarding day, and it's a day that literally swells our hearts with pride. So before we get started, I also want you to know that we love rewarding engagement. So the person who asks the best question will, let's say, gets the most upvotes, will stand to win a prize. Or if it's a question that makes us all think and go, wow, I've learned something, just in asking that question, I've learned something, then we will reward that person as well. Also, we do reward people for giving a lot of emojis and questions and lots of engagement. And so that is someone that we are going to also announce as whoever that person is could be the winner. Okay. I see we have another, I have another question you asked anonymously. Shall we ask why anonymous looks fantastic, a bit like the other people? It's definitely not like the other people. We are definitely our own green, our own color. All right, let's get cracking. The last thing I want to say to you guys is we have managed to secure one and a half non verifiable CPD points from Aisa. You have to stick around to the session, get the link, register on that link, and you will be able to claim then your points. All right, without further ado, Ayon, we are about to start right now. Right. Okay. I see some interesting comments there from Gregory McDonald. We're going to, we'll touch on that a little bit later in Carl Fandenberg. Does he's conversation or does he talk around what partnership looks like for Pp and what we think or where we think the brand, where we're taking this brand in the next couple of years. Without further ado, allow me to please onto the stage studio if you can. Bring on to the stage, Ms. Caroline King, and she is the head of sales strategy and analytics. She is going to talk to us today about some property market insights and also interesting home loan statistics. Caroline, are you with us? Have you gotten into the limo yet? Oh, Ross, I think Ross, this is our very first gift. Unbelievable. Thank you, Ross Taylor. Well done. Okay. Ayon, are you saying I can hear but no photo? So perhaps restart. One of the important things we need to remember is that Chrome works incredibly well with this platform. If you want to really get the most out of the platform, try and connect using Chrome. But without further ado, Caroline, the beautiful Caroline King is joining us today. Thank you so much. Enjoy the session, folks. Thanks, Trace. Thank you for that warm introduction and good morning to everybody. Good morning to the Cape. I'm sitting here in Johannesburg and it was very wet and very raining when I was in here this morning. I believe the sun is shining in Cape Town, so you definitely are having much better weather than we are at the moment. My name is Caroline King. I look after strategy, sales, and business analytics for apps or home loans. And I'd like to thank private property, our strategic partners for once again putting on a very awesome platform and allowing us to engage with you guys today. A little bit later, I'm going to introduce our regional manager for Western Cape. He's going to join me up on stage and we're happy to take any questions that you guys would have. But just before that, maybe let me just share a little bit of thoughts from our perspective around what we're seeing in the property industry. It's always very interesting when I do these talks though because I am definitely convinced that all of you on this platform are actually better poised to be giving me insights about the property industry. But let me take a stab and then you guys are welcome to share with me during the networking sessions around what you're seeing specifically in your areas. So the first slide that we're going to share is this one and I think it's becoming all too familiar around the mask wearing, the slight panic that we possibly all felt this time last year and what a journey the past 12 months really have been. You know, a pandemic that not only impacted our property industry, our country, but the whole world at the end of the day. And what we're going to share with you a little bit is what have we seen through the pandemic and what are we starting to see at the start of 2021. And I'm sure this pandemic hasn't only just impacted all of us from a business perspective, but personally as well. I'm sure that it's adapted how we're working, how we're living, how kids are going to school. And I'm sure that if we don't know someone directly, we know of someone who has lost a love one. And it's been a very emotional and emotive past 12 months as well. And what does this actually mean for the property industry? And let me share with you some numbers. And I promised private property that we would try not to be too much of a bank. So I promise they're not that many graphs in here. So what did we see over the past 12 months? I really talk about the past 12 months as a tale of two halves. We had the first half where the first quarter was actually quite booming in the property industry and then came March with lockdown level five. And all of you guys felt the true impact of that, not only personally, but also from a business context when the real estate industry effectively was shut down for almost two months of last year. And we can definitely see that when we look at apps as application volumes that our application volumes in the first half of the year went down by 9%. But what was the most amazing thing to see is the recovery in the second half of the year. We went down by 9%. And in the next six months of 2020, we saw growth of 36% in application volumes, which was a phenomenal recovery. I'm going to talk a little bit about what do we think drove that recovery when we look at the registrations that happened in the Deeds office. And all of you too, as well as us were impacted by the closures of Deeds offices and the very slow rollback or roll in of the Deeds offices across the country, specifically in Cape Town as well. But what was very interesting to see when we look back at the tale of two halves is that the second half of last year, the Deeds office registered double of what it did in the first half of last year. And again, just showing this tale of two halves through the year. The question that we're often posed with from a banking perspective is what does this mean about the quality of customer? Did you see the quality of customers start to decrease because we were worried about customers finances? We actually didn't see that the quality of customer upheld through the whole of last year. And that was actually what allowed us to maintain a very high approval rate as we saw the second half of the recovery unfold. And I think that is actually what was some of the main drivers towards the buoyancy of the property market and what we started to see, especially you guys from a sales perspective in the property industry. What we also look at from an APSA perspective is a proprietary index called the home owner sentiment index. And this is a proprietary index that we use to tell us, so we actually go and ask customers, what do they see and what do they think about home ownership? And we want to share, we've just gone our latest stats, which takes us all the way to the end of last year. And we use this quite often to test the barometer that we use to test how customers are feeling and what we can predict is going to come in the next quarter with regards to home ownership. And if you look at this graph, this home owner sentiment index all the way up until Q4, what you will see is in Q4 of last year, we had the highest sentiment at 80% of home ownership. This is customers telling us that they believe in home ownership and that what they think of home ownership. And it's the highest it's been, not only through last year, but it's the highest it's been since the inception of this index in 2015. So people think that home ownership is a very good thing. That's really what this index is telling us. We break down this index to four subcategories and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go through. If we can go to the next slide. Thanks, team. So what we what we saw here was the home sentiment index broken by region and we chose four of the top regions. So you guys would recall that the national average is sitting at 80%. Western Cape is sitting at 79%. So only 1% below the national. You can see that Xiaoting is really driving the sentiment at the moment, 1% up from the national. But that is actually where we've seen the most applications come through in 2020. What is interesting though, from a regional perspective and specifically for Western Cape, is that the 79% is 10% above where it was the previous quarter. So in Q4 of last year, the Western Cape home ownership sentiment increased by 10%. The highest increase across all of the regions. And we have some thoughts around that. We think that this is driven largely by what we call semigration, where we see some of our customers moving down towards the coast, where they're choosing lifestyle above being in a metro closer to work because work from home is now allowing this. And we think there's some interesting dynamics that are happening specifically in the Western Cape with regards to home ownership and how customers are purchasing their properties. If we go to the next slide, what we're going to look at is the home owner sentiment index by customer type. And we derive this by existing customers. So customers who have an existing home or live in an existing home, as well as our first time home buyers, our investors, as well as the renter. And what's very interesting to see across these sentiments is that the existing home owner has always lagged the home owner sentiment. And we think a little bit of that is due to a slightly underestimated value that they find once they've gone through the buying and selling, the selling and then buying phase of the property from a cost perspective. And they really spend some time now trying to understand how do they make it their home and so on and so forth. But what's interesting is that this is the customer type existing home owners who took a dip, as you can see in the middle of the quarter, but had the sharpest recovery through last year, all the way back up to Q4. What you'll see in that dark purple line and that deep V, that is the investor line. And we know that in the heart of lockdown, investors possibly had the lowest sentiment with regards to home ownership. And this was largely driven by economic circumstances. They didn't want to add additional properties onto their investor portfolio. And also what we started to see in the heart of lockdown was renter default. And I think this gave a little bit of a cautionary measure towards investors. But we're happy to see that the investors have bounced back through the last quarters of last year and have returned to just slightly higher, the highest that the home sentiment is just above first time home buyers. And I'm sure you guys are testimony to this as well, is through the heart of lockdown. It was the first time home buyers that really was the surge of recovery within the market. I'm going to talk a little bit about what the drivers of that surge was from the first time home buyer perspective. But what was interesting to see is in the heart of lockdown, it was the first time home buyers. And towards the end of the year, as we can see from this graph, it's the remortgage customers, the customers now buying their second or third home that were a little bit more cautious through the year. But towards the end of the last year returned back into the market. On the next graph, what we're going to see is the sentiment of buying versus the sentiment of selling property. And this is really your business at the end of the day. And what really is interesting here is to see that the buying sentiment, the top line, continues to uptick through the year. And the selling sentiment, the bottom line, started to increase, but definitely not at the rate at which the buying sentiment increased. And when you look at the end of 2019 Q4, you could see that the gap between buying and sentiment was at about 30%. But when you look at the gap between buying and selling sentiment at the end of last year, that increased to 45%. And what that does is we're now seeing that there are far more willing buyers than there are willing sellers. And that creates a very interesting dynamic within our industry. It starts to talk to stock shortages and it talks a little bit to what we're anticipating with regards to property prices. If we can go to the next slide. So understanding in Q4 what our customers are thinking and what we saw from a banking perspective, what does this mean for our industry going forward? And specifically, what does this mean from an interest rate perspective? And interest rates, we know, was one of the biggest drivers to homeowner sentiment throughout last year. The decrease of 3% of an interest rate actually allowed customers to enter into the property market. So what we started to see was first time home buyers who were previously renting for the same monthly rental, they could now afford a repayment on a mortgage loan. And we saw this drive of renters into buyers. And that was really predominantly that first time home buyer drive. What we also saw was with the lowering of the interest rates, was customers were able to afford more. And so they were able to qualify for more and they were also able to buy up or upscale at the end of the day. And we think largely the sentiment with regards to home ownership and especially in existing customers was driven by lifestyle. So we're all working from home. And what does that mean? We look around our house and we think, well, now we definitely need a study or we definitely need a bigger garden for the kids to run around. And actually, if I'm going to be locked down in my house, I think I should start to invest in my house. And so the dynamics of the property industry started to emerge. The increase in first time home buyers, followed by existing customers now looking to upscale from a work from home perspective driven by lifestyle. What we also started to see was the investor start to come back. With regards to understanding that there was opportunity in the property industry, the sentiment was good. And so they started to load more properties onto the portfolio. With regards to interest rates, the 3% drop was quite a drastic drop for one year. And we think that that will continue to drive the sentiment of home ownership as we only anticipate that a gradual increase in interest rates will start to emerge towards only the end of this year and will only return to pre-lockdown levels at the end of 2023. So we're really going to see this gradual increase in interest rates. And this is going to be one of those predominant drivers of home ownership. From a house price perspective, what does this mean? So we've got willing buyers and we're slowly starting to see a few more willing sellers, but not at the rate of the willing buyers. And this demand and supply is going to start to play out into this year. We knew that there was a lot of activity in the price range of 750 to 1.5 million last year. But we also know that that is where we started to see a few stock shortages. And so the introduction of developers bringing stock back onto the market is going to be very welcome for our willing buyers. And we're interesting to see whether the willing buyer is going to push the house prices up or whether it's going to remain stagnant at the moment. The one thing that we have seen with regards to house prices, though, it did not drop as drastically as we anticipated when we first went into lockdown. So house prices actually remained fairly stable, if not slightly upwards through 2020. But this demand and supply and the ability for us to release stock into the market is going to be what determines what house prices really are going to do. This slide at the moment, this is talking now to market relevance. And what you can see on the very right hand side, that is Western Cape. The red bars indicate the market decline that we saw in 2020. So despite seeing this massive recovery with regards to applications, sales of properties and so on and so forth, in the latter half of last year, it was not sufficient for us to catch up on what we saw from a market growth perspective on 2019. However, the top row, those darker purple bars, is what we're anticipating from a market growth perspective going into 2021. And what you'll see from where you guys had the sharpest decline from a market growth perspective. And you're probably going to see the smallest increase in market growth, but it will still be positive. This number is indicating 2% at the moment. However, in all great things with forecasting, we always talk about last year our crystal balls were exceptionally murky. It still is a little bit murky. There's still quite a few levers that we're watching to anticipate growth. What we can say it's going to be positive. But if I look at the applications we received in December last year, we were 40% higher at number of applications than in December of the previous year. And that just shows you that this continuous momentum that we were seeing in the second half of last year is continuing into this year. And for the first two months of 2021, up until the end of February, we were 20% higher in those two months than the previous year. And we've got to remember that the first two months, Jan to Feb was prior to lockdown last year, and we're 22% up. So we actually think from an app's perspective, we're going to need to revisit some of this forecasting because we actually think it might be higher than anticipated. The other levers though that we are watching, there are still instances where these offices still close for three days at a time in certain provinces. It hasn't quite happened within some of the regions, but in some of the other regions, we are still seeing that closure. We know in Khao Ting North that was drastically impacted at the beginning of the year because they opened much later than they anticipated. And also the return to government schooling in the middle of February also started with a slightly slower turn to the market. So there are still some factors that may be headwinds and may impact the growth, but we are definitely seeing at the moment a very positive sign with regards to the property industry. We're definitely seeing a lot of interest from customers at the moment. And the one thing that holds true and something that we have seen throughout last year is that the South African sentiment of owning your own home, the South African sentiment of home ownership transcends any pandemic, transcends any crisis. And we think that is actually the main driver that we've seen within the property industry. And specifically, even into the Western Cape, because that is a massive rebound that we are anticipating within your region, this sentiment of home ownership remains core to South Africans. And the aspiration that we want to place shelter and security around our family is still something that will continue to drive this industry. And so, despite what we've all gone through last year, especially from an estate agent's perspective, where you guys were prevented from working for many months of last year, impacting back pockets as well as lifestyles, we just want to thank you from Apsar for continuing to partner with us, for continuing to partner with private property, as we all continue to aspire to house the nation and shape the industry in a meaningful way. So just a few snippets from our side about what we're seeing and what we're continuing to see. And I think what we're going to move to now, Tracy, is to a little bit of a Q&A to make this a bit more interactive. And if you will allow me, I would like to call upon Dionne Fonzeil, who is my regional manager for Western Cape, if he can join me up on stage. So you guys also have a local face for Apsar. And if there are any questions or comments that you would like to ask after the session, you're welcome to reach out to Dionne. Let's say thank you to Caroline and maybe do a round of applause like we would. That was an incredible, incredible talk. Thank you, Caroline. Really interesting to note the sentiment, the overwhelming positivity of it. Dionne, welcome to the stage. Thank you, Tracy Lee Green. Thank you so much. Right, Linja. Awesome. I think we've got a couple of questions here. One from Elise Le Roux and one from Mark Stokel. Stokel, I think. I hope I pronounce that right. So let me read Elise's question first. And Dionne, I believe you're going to field it for us, right? So is this also because people believe that this is a buyer's market and property will be more affordable due to more distressed properties being available? I think she's referring to an earlier part of your presentation, Caroline. Dionne, do you want to just perhaps give us your thoughts on this question? Absolutely. Thank you so much for that question. I think it's an absolutely great question. I think we all expected, of the COVID pandemic in the beginning of lockdown, we all expected the market to be flooded by properties in distress. Now, if I can perhaps just indicate the following that during this period, apps are launched a program that we call payment relief. In that period, 114,000 clients were actually given relief for three months not to pay their payments. And guys, that on that stage was 3.4 billion. I'm glad to say that 94% of them is actually up to date as of today. So I don't think that whole thing about us waiting to see for the stress properties to flood the market is playing out at the moment. Not more than it was in normal cases about that answer that question. I think it does. And also Caroline, perhaps people thinking about reimagining how they live and wanting to invest in their own properties kind of gave those properties a new lease on life as well, I guess. Here's another question from Mark. Is your home owner sentiment report, index report, sorry, available publicly and can it be emailed to us? I can say yes to that. Absolutely. Caroline, is that correct? Okay. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. So Mark, if you can drop your email address into the chat, or you can send it to us, we will definitely add you onto our quarterly distribution list. And this report is actually also used by the SARB in their MPC meetings as an input when they determine dates and so on. So absolutely, this is a public report. So happy to have you on. I'm not sure whether Caroline or Dion would be comfortable to answer this, but it is, what impact do you think expropriation has on the sentiment of buyers or sellers? Tracy, I'm going to start open. Wow, I think all type of questions must go to you. I'm just going to start on my side, but that green now makes me distrust you. Now, I think we have to be open-minded around this. I think we have to understand that this is something that is part of our living, part of our daily economic activities that's starting to play out. And I don't think on this stage, we're going to take a side to say where is going to play out on the bottom or on the top side of it. So I think from a bank's point of view as well, we will go with what is currently in terms of our discussions with government. We are part of those discussions. And let us see at the end if a solution is put on the table that will absolutely serve the best of country and not being seen in the negative light as a lot of people is referring to it at the moment. Okay. Thank you for that. Obviously, a very sensitive and multi-layered conversation that needs to happen. And surely we won't be able to answer or touch on all the aspects of it in one question. So there's a question from Mark, which is, are the banks going to keep issuing 105% bonds throughout 2021, or while the interest rates are at 7%? And I think maybe, Dionne, if you can just tell us from Abso's perspective, of course, you're not speaking on behalf of everyone in the ecosystem, but you can speak or give us an... Okay. So Mark, once again, thank you for the question. The 105%, 5% bonds is definitely, we are currently applying that in one of our sub-segments that we call the young professionals. I think we are definitely in the market to start to test the markets for what is the result, because remember, offering a client 105% with cost is not always best advice for a client. You have to understand, can the affordability of this client over a period of time adjust to that? Can the property appreciation adjust over a period of time? So, yes, we are in the market. We are doing it in the young professional market, where we are financing young professionals with the NQFH or higher, and it's there to stay for us at the moment, most definitely. Thank you so, so much. Dionne, I don't see any other major questions here for you, but like I said before, the beauty about this platform is, and the Nexus event is that we're here to facilitate direct engagement with key stakeholders, within key stakeholders. Here's one last question. It's not yet been upvoted. Who's going to upvote that question for us so that Dionne has to answer it? Okay. It's been upvoted twice already. Dionne, what are your questions? They want you to get your crystal ball now. What are your predictions once interest rates pick up and new buyers who budgeted according to the current interest rates? What would happen to these individuals? I think that's really a good question. Great. Lots of upvotes there. Dionne, can you give us your thoughts on should interest rates? Okay. I think the basic principle of that question and again, what a great question is that you must understand when we do credit assessment on a client, we do something that we call a stress test. So we do already anticipate a certain percentage of rate increase over a period of time that compared with expected increases in salaries should place that client in that same position as the economy moves. So we do facilitate that process already in our credit assessment process. Okay. Excellent. And then Caroline, maybe some final thoughts from your side. It's not often that we have you in the room and it's a real privilege to have you on the stage with us today. Dionne, I'm going to excuse you and thank you very much for joining us. Please don't leave. We still have a couple more presentations, but thank you so much for joining us on the stage. Caroline, just a few last words before you. Just from our side is, you know, if there was ever an industry to be in, it's the property industry. It's a very emotive industry. We continue to make dreams come true. And I think it's definitely something that we want to thank all of everybody on here for joining us in really making dreams come true for our customers. So thank you very much. And thank you to Private Property for the opportunity. It's such a pleasure. Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Dionne. And thank you, APSA, for partnering with us with this series of Nexus Studio. I'm going to ask that we get that to the next portion of our program, which is engagement. And for this one, unlike the physical event, I'm actually going to ask you to take your cell phone in your hand and go to www.menti.com studio. There we go. They've just put the code onto the screen with me. And when you get to the website, you punch in this code, which is 4562-8137. Let me also acknowledge that I have two additional questions here, one from Mark Wilson. How do we feel that vaccines will affect confidence in the market? Perhaps some of our questions are coming on later. Either your head, yarn, or curl would maybe like to take a stab at answering this question. And then I'm going to ask the APSA team to also just give us their position regarding the financing of tiny homes or four tiny homes. Have you started looking at that? It's definitely something from a content point of view. We as Private Property have started looking into what a vibrant community that tiny home community is. All right. I think we've got a couple more. Let's wait a couple more minutes to see who else we can get into this mentee, mentee meter. Remember, if you punch in a silly name, we're going to see it. So rather punch in your actual name so that, well, we can keep things tidy. So we've got Deirdre, Tersha, Claudia, Trevor, Cherilise, Matt, Gemma, Delene, Nell, I see you there, Natasha, I see you. Chelsea, I see you. Denver, I see you. Iona, I see you. Let's give it a few more minutes. We have 107 people in the room and we only have 36 of you on the mentee meter. Let's see if we can push it up to 50. Let's see if we can push it up to 50. So we're just looking for 10 more people. Give me 10 more. There we go. 41. Who's that person? 41, 43. Let's push that number up to maybe 40, 49, 50. We're on 44 already. Chantal, I see you. Ricardo, Property Maverick, I see you there. Dwayne, I see you. Two more people and then Studio. Let's lock it in. Let's go. Look how beautiful those names all actually form a little bit of a heart. So here we go. First question. First, what is your job title or your role within the company that you are representing here today? So we know who we are talking to. All right. So the majority of you, let's get some more people in. Let's get some more votes in, some more responses in 36 people. 41 people have responded. 43 and out of 43, 51 people by now. The majority of you I can see are property practitioners, property professionals, estate agents, and intern agents. Let's go to the next question, please. And this is the next mentee question. What type of real estate transactions do you specialize in? Whoa, rentals. Quick of the mark. Sales and rentals. Sales, 13 rentals. I wonder how this will fare up to the other provinces in terms of attendees. We had quite a number of people tick the sales only box. Very interesting. We've also, let's go to the next question. Let's go to the next question, please, studio. Fantastic. This is my favorite question because, you know, we are, we put so many of these virtual events and virtual meetings together. I can tell you it was very difficult for me at the end. I get a lot of energy from people and having to fake that or make that energy work in a virtual environment, you tend to multitask a little bit. So sometimes, most of you saying sometimes, sometimes, and then some of you saying, yes, I am guilty. And nine of you saying I'm 100 percent focused. Look at that. So I guess it's probably related to the content. If the content is engaging, then it'll have your focused attention. Karen, thank you for that. Karen Duncan saying 100 percent studio. Let's go to the next question, please. In your opinion, is it a buyer's market or a seller's market? And some of the other Nexus rooms asked us to actually add both an option for both buyer and seller. But we really just want to get your opinion. You're the industry. You are the people that that are in the call face literally of this industry majority of you saying that it is very definitely a buyer's market. All right. Thank you so much for your opinion. Let's move on to the next one. Next question, please. Please. Let's keep this clean. Let's keep it tidy. I know my people from the Cape, you know, 2020 was a different year. This is now 2021. So give me one word, how you would describe 2021 so far. All right. There we go. Action packed, blessed, good, slow, exciting, challenging. We had a few words coming through yesterday like tough. There was another one. Crap. It's okay. Let's let's call a spade a spade. What does 20 like for you so far in one word? All right. Thank you studio. I think the biggest word here, because that's how the word cloud works, the biggest word is challenging. So more than one person said challenging, blessed and good, slow, busy, very, very interesting. We're all describing the same elephant. Isn't that fantastic to just as an idea, we're all describing the same thing, but we all have different experiences. Okay, let's go on to the next question. And this is the last question. This is the last question in the section studio. After this question, can we please get our next speaker on to the stage? In fact, we're going to take a five minute break. And if there's a question in our Q&A, I'm going to suggest that you use that question as a way to break the ice in your networking break. All right. So if you could change one thing in the South African real estate industry right now, what would it be? Agents working together. You would encourage agents to work together. You'd have read read less, less red tape, excuse me, let me put my teeth back in. You would the speed of conversions, the EAAB, nothing. That's a that's a lovely response. Nothing. Discount brokers, you'll scrap the expropriation bill, mandatory deposits on offers, prevent the Poppy Act from coming into play, Sunday show houses. That is so interesting. Okay, so let's this is it like we I think we can close off the section of the you can still enter in your your comments. And then we will still be able to look at them later. And what we always do at the end of these events, within a week or two, we send you a report and in that report, we tell you sort of what the overwhelming sentiment was. Okay, we're going to take a short break. Now I need a refill my coffee. I hope you do too. During the break, however, it's an opportunity for you to network with the people at your table. There can only be so many people at a table like I think six or eight. And if you want to participate in the conversation of the table, switch on your microphone, and then switch on your camera. And then that way you can discuss possibly some of the things you'd like to change about the industry. I know it's strange meeting people in your own private environments. I don't know where you're joining from. But you know, take a chance and connect. It's a nexus. I'll see you guys in five minutes. And welcome. Welcome back. I've just punched in welcome back. If you're back with me, please drop me a little emoji, something that describes how you're feeling right now. If you're back with us, we're about to call onto the stage our head of well, pay props, head of data and analytics. Her name is your head smarts. And then later on the stage, she'll be joined by the CEO of pay prop, Jan Darle, who will be sharing some very interesting information with us that I think you'll be very, very keen to hear. So what are your head? Are you back? Are you on the stage here? There you are. There you are. Lovely. Are you still in Salem, Bosch Mama? This week is fantastic, fantastic. Welcome. Thank you to everyone. Hi, Trish Kaff and us. When did I see you? Karen, I see you. Kobe, I see you. Natasha, thank you so much for really just engaging with us and being focused. This next part really drills into the rental market. So without me giving too much of a build up to this, your head, you're more than capable of taking us through. Thank you, Tracy. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for taking the time to listen to me this morning. I'm going to share my screen in a second. There are quite a few graphs. They're not that complicated. But I'm going to switch off my camera so that the presentation is on your full screen. You just get the right screen here. There we go. There we go. All right. So as Tracy said, I will be talking to you about what is going on. Hello, Dennis. I will be talking to you about what went on in the rental market in 2020. As most of you know, paper up is a transactional platform for rental agents. So that is where we pull our data from. I'm going to chat to you about firstly rent, then areas that was a big topic for the year 2020. I'll also touch on graded metrics. And then lastly, everyone joining this week is getting a bit of a sneak peek of our second paper of state of the rental industry survey results. So I'll end with a few highlights from that that hasn't been released yet. So you are getting secret sneak peek information about that. Starting with rent. So on your screen, you can see the inflation line. That's the blue one. And then rental growth, that is the red one. So you can see there at the, throughout 2019, rental growth trended between three and four percent more or less. And also mostly below inflation. So rental growth is increasing at a lower pace than inflation. And then there's a dip there in April, May, when lockdown was first announced. And in November, we saw the first ever since we started the paper of rental index in 2012, the first ever negative year on year rental growth. So what that means is that between November 2019 and November 2020, rental growth actually decreased by 0.3%. So rent got a little bit cheaper. So why did we see the rental growth under such pressure in the last year? So there are a few reasons. There's a demand side reason and a supply side reason that I will get to in a second. But not surprisingly affordability played a big role for many tenants. I think we all know someone who lost either their full income for a bit or just a partial partially loss of income. And that affected their ability to either move into larger properties, or they just simply couldn't afford larger rental increases. So instead of paying a six or seven percent increase, they would prefer to move to a similar priced property instead of paying that increase. So that's on the demand side. Then on the supply side, there are two reasons. Many Airbnb properties that were sitting empty because of travel bans weren't earning any income. And many of these were moved to the long term rental market. So that flooded the market with rental properties. And then secondly, due to the favorable interest rates, many investors are still buying buy-to-lead properties. And that again increased the supply of rental properties in the market. So both that lower demand for more expensive properties and the oversupply on the rental market puts downward pressure on rental growth. Do we see that changing in the near future? The short answer is no, because both of these are very inelastic in the short term, meaning it takes a longer time for these two factors to move back into equilibrium. Looking at basically the same statistics just measured quarterly here on year. And we added a trend line so you can clearly see the downward trend that rental growth followed over the last two years. It's worth noting that in 2017-2018, these rental growth figures were at 67%. So in 2019, rental growth was already under pressure. And then you can clearly see lockdown hit there at the beginning or quarter two of 2020. And rental growth literally halved between the first quarter and the second quarter. At the end of the year, it was only at 0.2% year on year. So again, what that means is between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2020, the average rent only increased by 10 grand. Now if we compare the Western Cape, and I know that we've been saying the Western Cape was the darling of the rental market for so long, but this feels like a distant memory of the last two years. We can see that the Western Cape rental growth in red was lower than the national average. And in the last three quarters of last year actually saw negative rental growth, meaning that year on year rent actually became a bit cheaper in the Western Cape. Putting this in perspective, out of all the provinces, five had negative rental growth. So don't feel so bad Western Cape. Four other provinces also experienced negative rental growth. The Western Cape is the only province with average rent of over 9,000 grand and is the most expensive province in which to live in the country. Moving on to arrears. So when we look at arrears of paper up, we look at two different metrics. We first look at the percentage of tenants in arrears and then we also look at the average size of arrears relative to rent. I'm going to show you both and they followed slightly different trends. You can see here on your screen that the percentage of tenants in arrears in the first quarter started at 19.4%. Then at the end of quarter one, lockdown was announced and that then increased to 25%, meaning that April, May, June 1 in every four tenants were in arrears. And I'll explain why we saw that in the second. Good news though is that figure improved again towards the end of the year. So it's peaked already. It is slowly improving but it is not yet at pre-lockdown levels. Looking at the other metric. So at the beginning of last year, a tenant on average owed almost 80% of one month's rent if a tenant were in arrears. Again, that peaked or that increased, that peaked in the third quarter and improved a bit in the last quarter. So it is quite a way off the pre-lockdown level and this arrears metric is a bit more sticky than the percentage tenants in arrears. So why did we see, why did that metric move the way it did? So if you look at the percentage tenants in arrears, I think we all also were in the situation that you weren't necessarily sure how your cash flow, what your cash flow would look like in lockdown and many tenants obviously experienced the same. Didn't know if they were going to stay home for a month or two, if they were going to take pay cuts. So due to that cash flow and certainty, many tenants stopped paying their rent in full. We also saw that many made payment arrangements with their agents and landlords and then towards the end of the second, towards the middle of the second quarter, it was announced that the economy is going to start opening slowly. Many tenants went back to work and then because they had cash flow certainty, they started paying their rent in full again and paid off arrears. Those tenants who could, still had jobs, still got their full income paid off their arrears. On the flip side of that, we saw the average arrears percentage peak in quarter three. So these tenants who just went back to work on the first of June paid off their rental arrears because those arrears were cleared mathematically, the average was pushed up. That is why this metric only peaked in the third quarter. Now if you still don't have a full salary or you still, you perhaps lost your job or your partner lost their job, you are still in a difficult financial position and this is why those, that remaining arrears are actually so sticky because if you think about it, to reduce that arrears percentage, you have to pay your rent in full plus pay extra to reduce your average arrears which is difficult to do for many tenants in the current economic climate. So let's compare waste and cab statistics to the national statistics. At the beginning of last year, only 15% of tenants were in arrears. This is the lowest percentage of arrears out of all the provinces but the waste and cab followed the same trend, peaked in the second quarter at 21% and ended the year at 18% below the national average but still above the 15.3% that we saw pre-lockdown. Then if we look at average arrears percentage, the province started at a lower than national level at 69% call it and then that actually increased all the way to 106% that was then above the national average and then improved slightly in the last, not slightly significantly in the last quarter to 94% but again still a long way off the 69% that we saw in the first quarter. So this metric is going to take a bit longer to recover to those pre-lockdown levels. Moving on to credit metrics. So where we get these metrics is our clients are able to do credit checks through the paper up system and we tally up all the metrics in those credit checks, average them and then report on them. So it's not necessarily the credit profile of a current tenant, it's the credit profile of someone applying for rental property. So those while they might overlap aren't necessarily the same samples so just keep that in mind. So nationally I'm not going to talk through all of these, just want to highlight one or two. You can see a metric like tenants with delinquencies, I'm sorry tenants with delinquencies, start at the year at 18.4% then increase in the second quarter, the first quarter of lockdown and then that recovered quite nicely back to pre-lockdown levels in quarter four. We all know that the repo rate was lowered substantially last year by three and a half basis points, I mean three and a half percentage points and you can see the impact of that on the percentage of debt, percentage of someone's income they spend on debt. So at the beginning of last year, almost half of a tenant's net income was spent on debt repayments and towards the end of the year, it was closer to 40%. Now if you spend a smaller percentage of your income on debt, you have more disposable income left at the end of the month which is what we see here. I was quite surprised to see that this credit score which is basically a summary of someone's credit profile or credit health actually increased during the year, I know it's only by three points but it was really encouraging to see that tenant health overall didn't deteriorate as much as I expected. We compare the Western Cape nationally, I can tell you that it's mostly good news, the Western Cape has the highest income out of all the provinces, also the I think the lowest or second lowest percentage of tenants with major delinquencies, so a major delinquency can include something like notices, defaults, just judgments, accounts in areas with three months or more. So that includes a list of things and then lastly I just want to mention that credit score in the Western Cape is nine points higher than national, so overall tenants in the Western Cape have really good credit health. Why did these metrics improve in 2020? So if I say improve, I'm talking about the credit score that increased a bit over the year. So if I had to take a few educated guesses then these will be it. We all know that low income tenants, low income consumers in general in the country were hit a bit harder during lockdown, so they lost more jobs during lockdown and it's possible that these tenants moved out of the rental market over the shorter, moved in with family, so there aren't credits being done on these low income tenants and they're on pulling down the average due to this. Tenants could also be staying longer in their properties due to affordability reasons mentioned earlier and since they're not applying for new and more expensive properties, we're not doing credit checks on these tenants. Hopefully some tenants are also a bit financially more responsible after COVID. I think we all had a bit of a fright and we had to rethink the amount of money that we spend on poos and entertainment and it's possible that tenants use that extra money during lockdown to pay off their debt or save a bit more, so they are possibly financially a bit more responsible. I did mention the effect that lower interest rates had on the data income ratio, so tenants are spending a smaller percentage of their income on debt and like I mentioned I was expecting credit metrics to worsen, also because good tenants now with a lower interest rate can actually afford to buy a home and actually with their good credit qualify for bonds, but that seems to be not the case and there are still good tenants out in the market. Lastly, the funnest bit of this presentation is the sneak peek of our state of the rental industry survey results. So this is the second time that we did this. We did one at the end of 2019 and again at the end of 2020 and to give you a quick overview of who took part because we seem to in our list of pay prop users and industry players should be no surprise that 95 percent of participants works in the property industry. 69 percent were either a business owner or a rental agent, so they really are underground they know what's going on so they have a good feel for the market and then 64 percent managed smallish rental portfolios 150 properties or less. First category and I think after the year that was 2020 and with COVID and working from home technology was the biggest category and I want to share just three insights with you. So 55 percent of participants said that they increased the use of technology in their business during COVID these are actually 55 percent said they fully agree another 25 percent that they said they agree that it increased the use so we're closer to 80 percent of people who said that they increased the use of technology in their business. 70 percent said they don't think that virtual viewings and 3d tours are going to go away when things return back to normal normal in quotation marks they think that that is here to stay and then 69 percent said that they believe it's more productive to increase automation than to increase the workflow so that's a great example of working smarter and not harder. A few things on the average rental portfolio 70 percent of participants said that the rental increases that they put through in 2020 was lower than normal so that was that you can see in that a rental growth graph but that again also boils down to affordability. This one was quite shocking to me 93 percent of participants made payment arrangements with tenants so that should give you an idea of just how many tenants were affected by affected financially by lockdown. 55 percent said that they have more vacant properties than normal during the year last year and that again speaks to that oversupply that we looked at earlier and then 64 percent this is a bit of a worrying number 64 percent said that they lowered their commission during 2020 to keep a mandate. Now this is a bit problematic and people don't necessarily always think about this but once you've lowered your commission your commission is your main source of income in your rental business once you've lowered your commission percentage it's going to be very difficult to raise it again so it is just something to consider you have to justify a higher commission percentage at some stage and that's a bit more difficult to do than lowering your commission. Looking at challenges quickly 51 percent said that finding good tenants is the single biggest challenge the second one was arrears so both of these again boils down to affordability the effect of lockdown on tenants pockets and then 68 percent said the ongoing effect of COVID is their biggest worry for 2021 and I'll end with some good news the last question of the survey how optimistic are you about the future of the rental market? Only five percent said that they were pessimistic 17 percent said that they don't really have an opinion they feel quite neutral about this and a whopping 78 percent said that they were optimistic about the future of the rental market so I went to have a look at the 2019 statistic and at the end of 2019 only 62 percent of what has been said that they were optimistic about the rental market so maybe we all think a little differently about life after lockdown and maybe us spirits are lifted and we are more optimistic in general if you want some more information about rent arrears credit metrics and also a few other interesting articles you can download the latest annual rental index at that address and I'll also put that in the chat box for you in a second thank you for listening I'm going to hand over to Yan there we go good morning everybody I'm talking to you from the sunny eastern wash and lovely to see quite a number of familiar names and places and it was our pleasure and our privilege to participate in these events and I want to thank Paul, Tracy, Lee, all the wonderful people that followed probably before this opportunity now unlike the other presenters I did not prepare a PowerPoint presentation for you should I have probably would have had to death by PowerPoint because today looking at what the future holds I'm going to just give you some insights into the new property practitioners act and specifically the regulations and as you all know the property practitioners act was probably going to be published on 3 october 2019 already and with that being the case you may be wondering why we as a state agents are still working in accordance with the old act the state agency affairs act of 1976 I think we all agree that this 45 year old piece of legislation is overdue for replacement since this old act dates back to an era before the internet digital marketing social media also before automated and integrated payment platforms such as microp reality is that the old act simply does not cater for today's realities how's it going to play out this year and further considering the new act we must remember that this act and like any other new act in itself only sets out the broad principles of the law it does not deal with the implementation thereof that is where regulations to an up the implementation and the application of the act now although the act was published in october 2019 its regulations have not been finalized or published in the government is it only once that is published will the act be implemented and will be all be working in accordance with the new legislation when is that likely to be we don't know but we do have a good idea of what the draft regulations to the property practitioners act entailed youtube covid 19 and the lockdown regulations the opportunity to submit comments on these draft regulations was extended to 20 november last year and now we await the final regulations so let's have a look at what we can expect i'm going to share my screen with you and technology allowing i'm going to try not to scroll around too much i'm just might make you see sick so you just get to the screen anybody see my screen there we go i'm going to start with section 54 of the act in other words trying to understand the intention of the legislator now i'm not going to read it verbatim it's quite comprehensive i don't want to spend time but i do um i'm going to point out point out certain articles or sections to you and i do suggest that you discuss these stipulations with your legal advisor and definitely with the auditor but let's have a look when we consider the contents of section 54 it deals with trust accounts now most of you know probably all of you will be familiar with section 32 of the old act the state agency affairs act that deals with trust monies now section 54 is materially the site and i'm just going to point out a few lines and it says in subsection one that every property practitioner must open and keep one or more separate trust accounts with certain references in it and then it must immediately after after opening a trust account must appoint an auditor and then immediately after that you must notify the authority in respect of such account and the appointment of the auditor now the authority is the eab it's a new name um but the principles haven't changed if i scroll down a bit um subsection two says the spot subsection one any property practitioner may invest in a separate savings account the funds that are not immediately required same as in the old act section 32 sub 2 and then this new section 54 carries on telling you what you must do once again what you must do and then as you probably know published in other languages then they are further a must use authority court then the authority might certainly use certain things and the court might use certain things but all of this is materially similar to the old act what is however very different and if we now scroll up and i'm just going to pick it immediately it's considering section 23 of the act once again making that the intention of the legislator if we hit that together 23 sub one says a property practitioner who's turnover is below 2.5 million must cause his or its accounting records to be subjected to an independent review by a registered accountant subject to the provisions of section 54 that deals with trust maintenance now just looking at the heading of this section it says exemptions in respect of accounting records and trust accounts so the concept of an exemption is new and then if we look at a threshold of 2.5 million ranch and let i reduce must be per annum must cause his or her or its accounting records to be subjected to an independent review it's no longer a formal court and this review can be conducted by a registered accountant no longer a chartered accountant so that is a significant change that we need to consider so let's read subsection 2 the minister may by noticing the gazette and that's the government gazette determine the circumstances under which certain property practitioners may be exempted from keeping trust accounts that's new property practitioners as you know i state agents they can or they may be exempted from keeping trust accounts which of course will lead to significant cost savings and further the minister may by noticing the government gazette determine if the different may determine a different dispensation for their review of accounting records in other words no longer orders so this is the intention of the act as i stated before now we need to consider how it's going to be implemented and how it's going to be applied and for now we can jump to the property practitioner regulations that were published in 2020 and let's see if the intention of the legislator is no more clear and once again i confirm that these are draft regulations i have reason to believe that this is pretty much final of the numerous drafts that were open for public comment for a very long time but it is not yet so it says this is regulation four of the regulations and it's and the heading says exemption from trust accounts pursuant to the provisions of section 23 that is the one we just read the following is prescribed a property practitioner is exempted from keeping a trust account if that property practitioner has never received any trust money other than as permitted in regulation 4.4 so no trust money for complying with regulation 4.4 and we will get to that subsection 2 a property practitioner is exempted from keeping the trust account if he no longer receives any trust monies other than as permitted in regulation 4.4 so the fact that you have been using it you can also it's not going to prevent you from applying for exemption so if those two subsections the contents they are complied with you also have to submit to the authority and affidavit in a pre-struct form and that affidavit is actually in these regulations you can see exactly what it is that you have to complete in order to apply for exemption and this will only be applicable if you are compliant with all these other regulations and you give a certain undertaking that you will not be receiving any trust funds after the date of your affidavit and really on that you provide evidence to the authority that any previously existing trust account have been winded down in terms of these regulations. I'm not going to read all the detail but that is the crux of the matter you can read it. So on time all of these are published it's available on the internet please seek advice from it. When we consider regulation 4.2 it says where a property practitioner is exempted in terms of required provided that the property practitioner has had any previously existing trust account reviewed in terms of relevant act. Such property practitioner will not be required to again have such account reviewed or audited it's done its history and you fight for it it is now time to move on. Regulation 4.3 states where a property practitioner is exempted in terms of the above and as compliant with the above regulation such property practitioner will be exempted from having to have its business and the other accounts audited and will only be required to have such accounts independently reviewed by a registered accountant. So it's no longer a formal audit of your trust account also taking cognizance of your business accounts you can simply appoint an accountant that who has to do an independent review much simpler much cheaper and definitely a benefit in a highly fragmented market cost savings always work. Right so looking at 4.4 that is probably the most important regulation if you are a rental estate agent who wants to make use of this opportunity take this opportunity to simplify your business and save seriously on good costs. 4.4 states that a property practitioner will further be exempted so further because you need to meet all the other criteria and in this case there's no particular threshold doesn't matter what your annual turnover is so a property practitioner will further be exempted from operating the trust account and having the audited if the property practitioner is otherwise compliant in terms of review these regulations and then there are five more things the conditions that you have to meet. You have to mandate one or more other property practitioners that specialize in collecting and distributing trust payments and such property practitioners will be referred to as the payment processing agent that is typically a pie prop and that payment processing agent must process such trust payments on and off of the estate agency in respect of all trust funds so all trust funds or rental trust funds must be managed by the payment processing agent and you may not have any other trust funds in other trust accounts. Important in 4.4.1 is that your payment processing agent must also be a property practitioner in terms of this same law and this same regulations it must have a valid FFC etc looking at the contents of 4.4.2 and this is and remember it's all the above and each payment processing agent mandated by the estate agency operates a trust environment that complies with the act and associated regulations so when you use a payment processor that payment processor must have a trust environment a complete holistic trust environment of all the agencies whose business it manages and that trust environment must be fully compliant 4.4.3 is remember it's and each payment processing agent like a pie prop mandated by the estate agency operates within that one trust environment separately auditable client accounts both in respect of each agency to provide such services and in respect of each client of each property practitioner so your payment processor has to do segregation of trust funds not only by agency by agency but within an agency's account must also segregate each landlords trust funds each tenants trust funds within the bigger trust environment and then looking at 4.4.4 the trust environment and each of the client accounts operated by the payment processing agents must be audited annually in compliance with the acting regulations and the audit reports in respect of must be submitted to the authority that's the key that can be in compliance with the activity and the regulations so your payment processor must also go through an audit process and they must still also submit their audit reports and put you in a position to submit that and then lastly when an agency uses such payment processor you may not hold trust money any trust money whatever outside of the manner provided for a month now the good news is that many of you who use accredited payment processing agents can apply for this i'm just going to scroll down and show you there's annexure here on page 11 of the regulations it's an affidavit by the property practitioner in respect of trust money and that's where you start your process to apply for exemption subject to all of the above so i'm pointing this out to you i'm not trying to do legal advice i'm confirming once again that these are only draft regulations we are awaiting the final publication we don't know where it's gonna when it's going to be but you may want to consider this and i think there is some relief especially for the smaller estate agencies and specifically the newer ones and on that note that's what we can expect from a different perspective i thank you all for your time and thank you back to you Tracey Lee awesome thank you so much yand i have a couple of questions here for you i know we're running up against the clock a little bit but if you can bear with us we have one more speaker that we'd like to bring on to the stage and it is Karl van den Berg from private property who's going to talk to us a little bit about the future of private property and how private property and the brand is planning its planning its destiny its road ahead so yes one or two questions that i think yan while you're here with me i think it would be important for us to just deal with um one was from Penelope Gurney and it received two uh two votes i think are we on the old or the new audit referring to section 23 for the 2021 tax year that's one question and the next question i'd like you to look at is one from Iona Schultz which is a very very good question actually is turnover of 2.5 million on the actual sales of the property or is it that is a 2.5 million turnover on the commission earned by us if you can handle those two questions for us yan i'd appreciate it in the meantime studio let's get Karl van den Berg and the team 100% so just scrolling back are we on the old or the new audit regulations for the 2021 tax year now this depending so at the moment this is not active yet so as we sit here today we are still in terms of the old regulations because the new ones will come into play once only once it is um once it is published and then with that the the EIOB or the authority will also have to then confirm as to how it's going to be applied that will be a practice note so Penelope where we are now the new ones it's the new section 23 is not applicable yet then looking at iona's question is turnover of 2.5 million silent property or is it commission earned remember that this deals with client money it's trust money so um the turn over is my my interpretation would be the flow of funds through through your account the turnover in the account so difficult to say but if we consider in most cases 2.5 million is is the value of one property two properties on average so this is the income through your business um so turnover through the account is is how i would interpret that thank you tricely thank you so much yan and just to echo what yan was saying is that we're not giving obviously not giving legal advice here we're just offering an interpretation and a way to look at some of the clauses am i correct yan would you would you be correct in saying there's still there's still a little bit that we all need to understand but thank you yan for bringing this information to our attention i'm gonna excuse you now from and um ask that carl from the bug bye bye bye take care what are you doing carl is going back against her i've got this wonderful laugh how are you doing it looks like i have a halo over my head when i've got it done so i've forgot to switch it off hi hi okay so carl you're here today to talk to us a little bit about what the future holds for the private property brand and what partnership looks like i just want to remind everyone that you are here today at nexus and it's a nexus with a specific focus on Cape Town the Atlantic seaboard area northern and southern suburbs and then the south peninsula area so and also to thank absa for being our strategic partner in bringing this particular nexus through to you don't forget to use the chat box to interact you guys are pros at this already if you have a question pop that question in there as you can see if you click on q and a you can see Penelope's question thank you Tracy uh and hello to the extended public property family in Cape Town it's an absolute privilege for us to go to to interact with you guys today you know obviously over the last year we've really really missed being in person with you guys having a cup of coffee and just sharing our knowledge and our understanding what's happening in the property market so we're really really grateful that we found this this platform and it's a wonderful way for us to really interact so today i'm really just going to cover around a couple points around where's private property at the moment and where it is that we're going and then i'll vacate the the stage and philine will join us uh our provincial head for the western Cape and she'll run through some of the insights that we see in your specific areas so really let's get started on this where is power property what are we doing well we're choosing to become the trusted partner in the property industry so as an example let's look at today right today we're in the center of the ecosystem as power property and we're pulling in our partners with absa and pay prop and we we're bringing bringing in real estate everybody else in real estate and we're just sharing knowledge and that's what it is that we really wanted to be as in the center of the ecosystem to do with anything with property so we've got two main sides to this ecosystem really and the one is our consumers what we classify as people that are shopping that buying that are wanting to rent and on the other side we've got our partners and our clients that's estate agents attorneys banks bond originators and everybody else in the other side so if we need to be in the center it's a bit of a balancing act right so if we listen a little bit too much to what our clients are wanting we run the risk of alienating 57 million people and what are those 57 million people they're just going to vote with their feet and they find another place to to research property and find out about property and by property again likewise if we focus too much on the consumer we run the risk of alienating our clients so it's a bit of a tightrope but it's something that we're choosing to be and it's something that we've been doing really really well as of late if we didn't go on to you know how is it that we're going to become this trusted partner it really is around being completely customer obsessed and again that's real estate it's consumers it's everything it's if we have a complete obsession and a complete understanding of what it is that people that are using our portal to do search for properties what are they what are their pain points what are they going to get out what is it that real estate needs what are their pain points if we have a complete understanding around that we have the ability to solve real people's problems and we're choosing to solve these real people problems with digital technology so again if you understand the customer really really well you have the ability to solve real problems and once you've got that you then have the ability to really create some magic and actually create valuable propositions in one of our earlier nexuses this week there was a comment around a pain point that a client that a real estate agent had and that was that their suggestion was that you know if somebody enters into an or signs an offer to purchase they should be pre-qualified first before they even allowed to do that now an example of a really really good value proposition is if we can as private property understand our consumer incredibly well and use things like an absolute pre-approval and when we give the lead over to yourself so when the consumer says this and I want to go look at that property we can give you the lead that you know the person is pre-qualified by ABSA you know that they're looking at a three-bedroom house in a certain area you know that they've got 2.5 children and a cat and a dog and that's the journey that we need to work together to be able to create so some real magic there on the end that you've got to have those first two steps first so where is private property in our five year strategy 2019 was really all about preparation we've got a brand new CEO he brought in a brand new executive team I think I'm one of the oldest ones in the business I've been in business about 18 months in 2019 we really just sat back and went where is this business now and where do we need to take it to to really really grow so that was 2019 2020 I'll spend a little bit of time on the next slide but that was our foundation year 2021 is our innovation year and it's our watershed moment for private property this is the year that we bring proper technology into the the ecosystem of real estate and it's a real real important year for us and I'll share a little bit of information around what it is that we're going to be doing 2022 is about repositioning 23 is optimizing 2024 is really about scaling up because once you've got the right market share you've got enough consumers coming in we can really really really give a lot of value to to all of our partners if you didn't notice and trace you mentioned we look fundamentally different right now as opposed to a year ago I don't even remember being that red blue and white color anymore and it's not to us it's not just a brand change it's not just a brand refresh it's not just a green color it marks an anniversary and today's that anniversary day it's our first year although we're a 22 year old business this is our first birthday as a new business we look different we communicate different we share different and we engage very very differently so it's far from just a pretty green color for us as private property we live and breathe this brand now as as a business where are we so by the end of that five year strategy we wanted to be at at five million unique users every single month on on our portal it might seem like a bit of an ambitious number but let me share some information right now we're averaging 3.2 million unique users every single month let's put them into perspective a year ago this time we it's a million a million consumer growth 12 months ago and if we compare it to two years ago we've grown by more than two million unique users every single month that's all so right now 3.2 million unique people coming on to our portal and looking at your properties we're incredibly part of that growth we're ahead of our expectations and we really really are going to see an accelerated growth specifically at the end at the second half of this year so I want to spend a bit of time talking around sort of evolution of technology so there's this whole thing around you know are we in an evolution or a revolution you know you've got pop tech you got fintech and all of these words and is it moving fast which direction is it moving in so I want to just unpack this a little bit so let's look at an evolution of technology if you take your old Nokia 2110 and you hold it up to your iPhone 12 you would look at that side by side and go that is an absolute revolution in technology we're infected actually isn't because 21 these two cell phones were made almost 25 years apart that's actually an evolution it's a slow and gradual change in technology and speed and and how does it we operate a revolution and an example of a revolution is what we've all just gone through 12 months ago we used to sit in our slunger offices in Durban KZN with 180 degrees C views and laugh was great now we're working in our home offices I'm in my home office I'm waiting for my children to barge through the door and join this meeting today that's an example of a revolution change in technology a year ago most of us hadn't heard of RIMO which we're on today we haven't heard of Google Hangouts we never used Teams we didn't know what Zoom was and we're all completely adapted to this new and sudden change what's really important is it's not just us that has changed but the consumers the people that are buying that are renting the landlords they have fundamentally changed how they shop and how they look for property we heard your head speaking around virtual reality it's a key part of the of the future around searching for property virtual realities and metaphors and the rest of consumers want to know property very very well before they start looking at it which is a good thing for real estate in my opinion because you start now really separate the buyers from the shoppers I know a day in the life of a real estate agent I can only imagine listing a new property and getting three four five hundred leads in a single day how are you ever going to get to that so our view and our goal as part of property really is to start separating those buyers from the shoppers and give you quality leads another example is Facebook if you look at our social media we fast approaching 700 000 people on our social media just on Facebook alone we're almost at 550 000 every time we put one of your properties onto our Facebook page we get 15 on average 15 000 impressions per property in fact we did a virtual show the other day for I think it was a Western Cape property we have 500 000 people view that video that is a fundamental change in how people shop for property and how they engage and us as a business and your sales is real estate we need to make sure that we're ahead of that and we understand that and can engage with these new consumers in terms of building a modern platform in a few months time we'll start engaging quite heavily with your sales and do some change management so there's going to be a fundamental change in in private property and how it is that you engage with us so essentially we're going to have two arms to private property one is a consumer based one which is a new website and a new app this allows us to know our consumers significantly better allows them to search for your properties much much better it has higher google at ranking and all the rest of those great things that come with the use of new technology on the other side we'll be having a brand new client portal which is for yourselves where you'll be able to gather and know this information the same stuff that we're sharing with you today you'll be able to start getting an understanding of what is your market share what are your leads where are your leads coming from where are these consumers based that are doing your properties that's what it is that we're going to be launching in a few months time it starts out as quite a basic show it looks great it interacts really really well and over time every two to four weeks we'll be launching new and exciting products and features on these two portals so we're looking incredibly forward to these things again you imagine the day when you start getting a lead and you know exactly that there's an 80 probability that this person is at the very least going to put in an offer that they've got an absent pre-approval that that day is not far off we just all need to walk in that same direction which is why we value yourselves as partners so much I suppose the the final point is really around humanizing the digital journey we use the word disruption and I fear that the word disruption has got a really negative connotation so people hear disruption and they go specifically in this industry and they start going what does disruption mean does that mean they're going to cut off ourselves as an agent how's that going to impact me and all of these things our view it's completely opposite to that let's understand this in South Africa property ownership is highly immersive it's probably the single biggest purchase any South African is ever going to do in their lives there is a human being that is selling there's a human being that is buying there's a human agent that's facilitating there's a human attorney and there's a human behind the bank believe it or not but that is the key and the important thing what is really really important is that we use technology to make your lives more efficient to make the consumers lives a lot easier so that to us is really around how we wanting to disrupt the real estate model we wanting to bring technology to the fore and allow you to simplify your lives as I said in the first one of the first slides if we're customer obsessed we can solve real problems and we can create some real real real magic so thank you again for everybody for joining us today I think I'm going to come with this Colleen's going to join and she's going to start sharing some really really good information around what's happening in your area from a private property perspective I'll probably come in after that for some questions if there are any questions yeah absolutely okay there we go thank you for using your microphone thank you for lean for also muting I see a couple of questions yeah I just want to acknowledge them there's a question in the q&a Matt Mercer asked but I think I think Gemma answered that question for us are there any other other questions no there was a suggestion or a request from um um where is he now Ricardo yes asking you know if we can tweak one or two of the the experiences that we currently have on the website and I do have a response for you but I think let me bring for lean into this conversation so that she can share specific sets of information with you in your specific areas um for lean how you do it I am doing extremely well thank you crazy um and thank you for everybody that is dialed in today us Captonians don't only fancy our mountain but we also love a good get together and I'm always one saying at the actual events in our past lives of course that um this always feels like a mini family reunion um today it will just have to be without the hugs um and the one but uh I do look forward to a time when we can once again engage on that level however for today let's focus on the here and now and what 2020 bought us and brought us taught us uh from a from an industry perspective so from private property um we believe obviously that the knowledge empowers and equips our property shoppers those are our consumers the feet and the eyeballs coming to the set and your buyers to make the best property buying decisions that they possibly can however we also believe the same can be said in terms of you the property professional and for the purpose of today's presentation I aim to give like Tracy earlier mentioned area specific information within the Cape Metro obviously very aware of the time constraints we have so I've tried to keep it to the point and the point of course being that there's a very very targeted large audience out there looking searching and most importantly inquiring people with property needs that you obviously need to attend to so for the purpose of today I've taken the Cape Metro and there's the mountain again so greatly um it differs obviously from from area to area so what I've done is I've broken the information down into the following areas stipulated there the Atlantic seaboard and Cape Town city bowl then I've taken uh secondly the Cape Platinum at Lewis Fountain thirdly the northern suburbs or more affectionately known as the Bouddhavoush Khurdane to us here in Cape Town the western seaboard the peninsula also known as Falls Bay and then obviously the southern suburbs so I will try my utmost best not to bore you or to kill you by PowerPoint as Jan says however I believe these statistics will definitely be relevant and interesting to you based on where you are sitting and where you've tuned in from today so if we can go to the next slide please studio and we are going to start with the Atlantic seaboard and the Cape Town CBD and the performance we've seen um over the last three years so take we are going up I've literally um splitted up into sales and I've added the rental view in the same view here so looking at the sales views we can see that going into 2019 there was quite a significant increase in views and then a further 40 percent increase in views from a sales perspective lead wise 12 and 6 percent into 2020 the rental views and leads believe it or not really is an interesting one here um 50 percent rental views 33 for 2020 and then I really want you to pay attention here to what the rental leads did 42 percent in 2019 and the 7 percent increase into 2020 so taken into consideration what we've seen in the rental market and having been in the nexus seminars over the past couple of days and having prepared this presentation and listening to you head earlier I can say that this is quite a rare phenomena at the moment rental leads increases are few and far between so I am sure we can speculate a lot um as to why the 7 percent increase and I would love to hear your views moving on to the Cape flats and my choice one time I believe the slide to be very interesting especially from a rental perspective once again um also when we get to the top 50 searched suburbs a little later you'll notice a similar trend in terms of activity when it comes to sales listings and um what I want to point out here is once again you can see the significant growth in terms of sales views from year to year and then the same on the same side sorry the sales leads 44 and 24 percent I had to go back and double check the rental views and the rental leads um an increase from 2018 to 2019 of 157 percent and the further 16 and then 143 percent in terms of leads into 2019 then there's a little back step and this is what I mentioned just now uh definitely not going back into the um 2018 level but um it makes me think of that saying that someone that have figured out taking a small step backwards after having taken a big step forward it's not an absolute disaster but rather we should think of it as a chacha so I suppose this is um our our dance with COVID and the impact that's had on the rental industry at large um moving on to the following suburb the northern suburbs once again you can see the increases there in terms of sales views sales leads and then the rental views interestingly also quite a significant jump 97 percent into 2019 and a further 16 in terms of views lots of eyeballs there and then in terms of the leads generated 88 percent increase and further back step again there we go 11 percent moving on to the western sea board I believe is next similar very very similar trends there 51 and a further 54 percent in terms of sales views so once again lots of activity there sales leads also definitely not to be grounded and then the sales the rental views I find it interesting I've heard of a couple of people actually residing a little bit inland in Cape Town that during lockdown last year rented out spots on the beach front due to competitive pricing just for that period of lockdown it was quite interesting to see a little bit of sea views being posted on the socials but there it is the back step again 12 percent reduced in 2020 in terms of um of rental leads the peninsula very interesting again um traditionally a little bit quieter on the activity side having gone up 30 percent in terms of 2019 and a further 50 um and then the rental leads a smaller back step in terms of rental leads just five percent and then lastly the southern suburbs um 37 percent increase in in sales searches 15 and a further 15 increase in sales leads into 2020 um rental views similar trained fantastic um 51 percent in rental views in 2019 13 percent and then a 41 percent gain in rental leads and there's the back step again 10 percent um into 2020 right so moving on to the top search suburbs and my second last slide I find this really interesting and if you keep an eye on the data and you do regular comparisons um it is interesting to see how these change and with Mitchell's playing very interestingly at the very top of these results with an average of 320 listings sales listings on offer and showcased in this area at any given time so by looking at these suburbs versus the list of a year or two ago it is our view that there is a new set of browsers coming to the site a market looking for properties just below the 1 million mark and most probably first time home buyers hungry for information and knowledge about how they can finally dream home um and we also believe that that to be a mostly untapped market and I almost want to say hashtag opportunity here so there's lots of interesting entrance here it's Dancha Sea Point Claremont Camps Bay also very high on the list but then again we wouldn't want to live close to the pristine and serene beaches of Cape Town not to mention our beautiful mountain and then moving down the list beautiful table view always it's remained on the list forever and this time bringing along its friend Parklands North to the cool kid's circle and then grassy park and artery retreat also there I also saw Dan up by in there within the garden route so yeah when you drill into the areas it also becomes quite interesting to see where the eyeballs are going and then moving on to my very last slide about medium price before I look before we look at the data though I'd like to remind you of two things so firstly what is a median price so firstly it is the very middle point of real estate prices so it's not the same as an average though importantly the median price is the price in the very middle of a data set with exactly half of the houses priced for less and the other half priced for more and then secondly these are referring to listing prices so obviously not the final selling price we don't have view of that just yet but yeah if we look at the data here with no surprises the western Cape on average about 30 percent higher than the national sales median and for rentals about 28 percent higher than what rental properties are at in on a national level I suppose everybody wants to live in Cape Town and they will pay for wanting to do so also interesting to note on the sales side when looking at the median from last year 2020 in February comparing it to the last month there's been a mere three percent drop in price compared to last month's February 2021 from a rental perspective though we did notice a nine percent decrease in the median from last year February to this and then having listened to what your head had to say she gave great insights with regards to the drop here earlier in her presentation but I believe it's also due to some right sizing on the part of the landlord apparently especially in Cape Town the prices were quite high and that folks is really all I have for you today however I would really like to extend a very heartfelt invitation to all of you that would like to engage with us afterwards my team and I would gladly set up meetings to answer any questions you have relevant to your particular area Deirdre and Louise has joined us today unfortunately Carrie Lee can't be here um but yeah I will put my details my email address in the chat box and we really look forward to hearing back from you um thank you Tracy back to you thank you so much for there we go just put me put me on mute on or put yourself on mute on your side fantastic okay thank you so much for lean as you can see this event is going to end in the next 14 minutes and we've already had quite a number of our delegates drop off I think that's due either to load shedding or to the fact that we tend to like meetings in a virtual environment where in the past we may have had a bit of time to travel in between spaces we now tend to virtually just you know literally give ourselves 10 minute 10 minute break run into the bathroom get some coffee and then bam we're in the next one so that that is why we're losing well that's why some some of the people have already dropped off but I see that there are a few questions yeah I'm going to start with Ricardo's to call private property needs to allow multiple search searches at once area searches at once when looking to buy in he said blowberg strand etc it's tedious to do all those areas and for people moving there they don't know that there is all those many areas within an area something that we already are looking at right Carl and I see you switched your camera on that's the first question Carl I want you to answer Matt Mercer also Africa ever have a portal owned by the industry such as realtor.com in the US what would be the advantage and advantages and disadvantages of such a portal and would be that trusted partner I hope so we definitely hope so maybe Carl you you you responded to that or answered that in your talk but maybe just touch on that and then the last thing I want you to tackle Carl or maybe Felene you can tell us is is hard very together with the Atlanta it is for the purposes of today's presentation it was yes so Carl please go yeah absolutely so one of the first bits of technology we're going to be having will solve that problem around being able to search for for different suburbs so what we do is we do user storage right so we go as a consumer I am moving to Cape Town from Joe book how do I know that blowberg is here and how is there you just simply don't so that's again us understanding the pain points of the consumer and using technology to do that that's actually going to be one of the first bits of of new tech that we're going to be bringing so that's a double thumbs up that will be solving that in the next couple months and as well as a whole host of other things right so we've obviously we've been engaging with real estate pretty much our entire existence so we we understand really good starting point around what your pain points are so our first couple iterations on our new technology will be solving a lot of these pain points for consumers and for clients the next ones are probably a bit of a politically loaded question but I'll take a stab it in any case probably property does have a minority shareholders of real estate and we actually with the ea ppc actually opened up beginning of this year late last year to other people so there is a minority stake of ownership and property through real estate advantages and disadvantages pretty much what I was saying in this year right how do you get that balance right so what's what clients want is not always the same as what consumers want so if you wholly owned by real estate it would be a difficult thing to try and manage whereas luckily with the way we position we are in the center and we try and sort out both things but it's absolutely there's obviously lots of pros on it that we've got great partners in all of us but you don't need to be a shareholder to be a partner in private properties I think really what we want it to be we speak about us being humans you being humans we cherish the word partnership and we want to work together we're not always going to agree but we do want to work together very much for a really good response to that politically charged question call much appreciate it I'm going to release you both from the from this have a wonderful rest of your day and thank you so much I think that brings us completely to the end of our conversation here today the Nexus for today that had its focus on the Cape Metro Atlantic seaboard northern and southern suburbs and south peninsula thank you so much for joining us today I just have a few more things to share with you before I go and that is that if you look at it this chat here Trish just popped in the link for you to be able to register for your one and a half non-verifiable CPT points courtesy of Aisa click on that and then register for your points Anita I think we're gonna this event is open for the next nine minutes and 49 seconds I'm gonna ask that Trish reaches out to those in the world who need a little bit more assistance on how to get their points everyone I want to thank you so much for being here today thank you so much to apps and pay prop for sharing their knowledge and insights with us we appreciate every single one of you in attendance today and trust that it's been of value why don't you drop me a little emoji to say thank you so much thank you JP Ricketts I see you Gemma thank you Nicola thank you thank you for the all those African Proverbs and thank you for the good conversation we are going to have these Nexus series again in the future and drop us a line if there's anything in particular you think we can tackle together in this format for the rest of the day I wish you a brilliant brilliant day ahead and remember tomorrow is our final set of Nexus and we're going to be focusing on the how-ting region region so don't miss that thank you so much Lynette thank you Lynette Lambrecht I see you there I'm gonna I'm gonna sign off but like I said the event will be open for the next eight minutes if you switch on your camera you can greet your colleagues if you switch on your mic they will just be able to hear your voice but thank you so much for your time we really really appreciate you and this is me Tracy Miller signing off on behalf of the Nexus Cape Town Atlantic seaboard northern seaboard northern and southern suburb south peninsula in partnership with Apsa thank you have a wonderful day