 Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. How Tang this is the how Tang nexus If you can hear me clearly Please drop me a good morning in the chat and let me just say good morning to everyone in the room Morning, Tanya. Morning, Nicole. Hi, your head. It's nice to see you again. Good morning. Sean Dubé. Good morning Nadia Good morning, Andal, Frenita, Andre, Kuobis. You're back, Frenita. Thank you so much for joining us this morning Good morning, Anne. Ishtiak. Good morning, Andre, Adal. Good morning, Cornelia. Good morning, Busisiwe. Good morning again, Jan. Good morning, Michelle. Alright, you can hear me. Fantastic. Awesome. Normally, I have to give the room a couple of minutes to warm up and give people a couple of minutes to join in But this is the how Tang nexus. If how Tang sneezes, the rest of the country gets a cold. We are on top of it. We are ready. We are here. I'm sitting in Brownfontein. So I'm right here in the beautiful Johannesburg. And I just want to say good morning to you. Thank you for taking the time to join us for this first series of nexus. We kept the best for last. We kept the how Tang region for last. We've got our final day of nexus today. So we'll have one nexus this morning from 10 till half past 11. Sometimes we push it over a little bit and end at 12. And then this afternoon, we have another nexus that starts at two o'clock and that will end around half past three. Sometimes it goes on until about four. So without further ado, let me just introduce myself. I'm Tracy Lee Millen. I'm the brand and marketing executive yet private property. And I'm going to be your host for this morning session. So the word nexus means a series of connections linking to or more things. And if you're wondering what we're doing here today, that's exactly what we're doing. This is exactly what a nexus event is about. It's a series of digital networking events which cultivates people interaction through knowledge sharing and networking. So last year we had a nexus. Good morning. Good morning. I still see some people coming in. Good morning, Wesley. Good morning, Ursula. Make yourself at home. Good morning, Emmanuel. Good to see you, Mike. All right. So we hosted our first nexus last year in November. Let me know if you were part of that nexus. Good morning, Carl van der Berg. Were you part of that nexus last year around November? It was a more of a national program. And this year we decided we're going to do something different. We're going to do it bigger and better. And the difference this year with the nexus is that we're tailoring events to specific regions. And then the insights that we bring out to you in those regions are incredibly relevant to you in your area. And we do that because we want to give you the best possible chance of achieving success in your tough market. Let me know where you're actually watching from. I see Marilyn is from Benoni. Hi, Benoni. How are you doing, Benoni? Sheppard, thank you so much for letting me know that you were part of that first nexus. Awesome, Shalee. You were also part of that nexus. Petronella, good morning, good morning, good morning. Medran, I see Pretoria is in the house. Rueda Puert is in the house. Eden Vale. Your head is in the beautiful Stellenbosch area. On Monday, we actually had somebody joining us from all the way from the UK. So that's the beauty of virtual, as you can literally join from wherever you are. I'm going to ask you one more question before we get the program moving. Are you fully dressed for work or are you work at the top and party at the bottom? Basically, are you wearing pajama pants? Yes or no? Just say yes or no. Yes or no? Are you still wearing pajama pants? You wouldn't be blamed. I wouldn't blame you. Good morning, Morningside. Hi, Patricia. Welcome, welcome, Dorothy. This is where you're in four ways. Wonderful. Thank you for joining us. And I see Andra, you're in a lovo. Pomona, fantastic. Fantastic. I see all of you. Western in the house, Jobeck South in the house, Santon. So, okay, who's wearing pajama pants at the bottom? Let's see who's honest. I'm joking. I'm joking. All right. So, Tersha is definitely not wearing pajama pants. I'm not, Inna's not. Leticia's not fully focused. We're here. We're ready to rock and we're ready to roll. So, this platform that we're on today is a very engaging platform and we chose it specifically because we didn't just want to talk at you. So, you can see already so many of you are in this chat, in the chat room, all up in the chats. So, let me see how young you are. If take, click on the emoji button and give me an emoji that kind of personifies how you feel right now. So, I'm going to give you a green emoji because my heart is obviously green. Give me one emoji that, okay, because I see you, Chloe, awesome Veronica. This is by far the biggest room. This is super exciting for us to see it. We are, like, we literally left the best for last. Lizelle, we're in it to win it, girl. Ishtiak, you've got music playing in the background. Is that so? Okay, fantastic. I can see we're all in a good mood. We're in a good mood. We're lighthearted. We got that money face on. We got that game face on. So, now you know how the chat function works. Next to it, there's a participants button and that button gives you the opportunity to connect with anyone in the room. Absolutely anyone in the room. If you hang your cursor over it, click message user. That person will get the message direct. Be careful though. If you're sending people DMs, make sure that you're not putting it in the general chat because then we all will see it. The third button is a Q&A button. So, I'm going to ask you a question and then you in the room have the opportunity to upvote the question. If the question is relevant enough for the session. So, the question I'm going to ask you is, what is your favorite color? Use the chat function to tell me what your favorite color is. But before you do that, please can someone upvote me? I know, Ben, you're going to upvote me. Upvote my question. It's a very important question. There we go. Can you guys see how the upvotes work? Right. So, once the speaker has spoken and if there's a question that you want to ask, pop the question in the Q&A. And if it's a question that other people also want to know the answer of, they will upvote and when the speaker is done speaking, then he will tackle that question for you or she will tackle that question for you or they will tackle that question for you. So, let me see whose colors are here. All right, blue, orange, red. Mine is obviously green. Okay, excellent. I think we feel a little bit more familiar with the platform. There we go. All right, let's move on to the program at hand. There's just one or two more things that I want to tell you. We're going to be giving out a prize for the most engaged and the best question. So, get involved. Also, we have one and a half non-verifiable CPD points on offer from Aisa for you to get your points. Stick around till the end of the session. We will drop a link in the chat. Click on the link and register to get your points. All right. So, without further ado, studio. Hi, Kathy. I see you. I see you Bianca Turquoise. That's a beautiful. Andre van Royen says he's available for a DM. Okay, Andre. All right. Studio, can we bring on our first guest and let me introduce this amazing person to you. Her name is Caroline King and she's the head of sales strategy and analytics for Apsa. Apsa is of course our strategic partner and they are helping us put this nexus together. Let's welcome her onto the stage. There she is. She's going to share some valuable insights for us today. Enjoy. Thank you, Tracy. And good morning, Xiaoting. What a beautiful day it is today. Hey, I couldn't say that if it was yesterday. It was very bleak and raining in the morning yesterday. But today is a beautiful day. The sun is shining and we are so excited to be on this platform. And thank you once again to our strategic partners and private property for affording us the opportunity to join you guys today. I've got a bit of a rapid fire presentation for you guys. I want to share a little bit about what we have seen through the market, especially over the past year and a little bit into what we're predicting for the next year, this year. And I have no doubt though that you guys can probably share far more insights around what you're seeing in the region from what I'm going to tell you at the moment. But let me give you a brief perspective to kick this conversation off. If we can go to the next slide, I think, you know, I always start my presentations lately with this kind of a slide because it was so traumatic for our property industry last year. You know, a global pandemic that not only impacted our industry, our country, but the whole world. And you know, the 12 months from now, actually, I think we're almost going into one year anniversary of level five lockdown. And I'm sure you all remember that level five and level four, where it completely impacted our ability to do what we love to do and to do the work that we need to do. But what have we actually seen coming out of this pandemic? On the next slide, just a few stats from our perspective and I like to refer to the year as the year of two halves. And this is really what the slide kind of says to us. So if we start with what we saw from a banking perspective in application volumes, you could see in the first six months of 2020, we actually came out with a negative growth when we came out of June. And that was largely due to the economic activity, the lockdown levels. You guys weren't able to sell houses. We weren't getting any applications and there was this dramatic dip. In fact, we talk about falling off a cliff, going from a really strong Q1 and then almost in Q2, hardly any business being written. But what was so amazing was the recovery in the second half of the year. And what we saw in applications, so customers applying for mortgage finance, is we saw this amazing recovery of over 36% growth in H2 on the previous year. How amazing is that guys? And that just shows the resilience of this property market. What did that mean from a registrations perspective? What did we start seeing in the deeds offices and you guys just as we were impacted by the closures of deeds offices that took a little bit longer to run. And then as we started to recover than just switching on the property industry, what we saw in the second half of last year was that we registered two times more properties than we did in the first half. And that's why we call 2020 the tale of two halves. The question that I often get asked is what did that mean about the quality of the customer? Did we see a deterioration in the quality of the customer? As customers finances were impacted, jobs were lost, small medium enterprises started to close down. Surprisingly, our quality of customer threshold upheld throughout the year. And what we actually saw was customers leveraging the opportunity to purchase properties. And so we didn't actually see a decline in the quality of our customers. So we also run it after a homeowner sentiment index, which I'm going to take you through now. And this is really where we go out to customers and we ask customers, what do they think about home ownership? And so what did our customers say to us on the next slide, please? And it's very interesting the sentiment around home ownership. And if we go to the next slide where we actually see the graph around this overall sentiment, what we can start to see is in Q4, the very end, the very last quarter of last year, we saw the highest sentiment around home ownership, not only in 2020, but since the inception of this index in 2015. So customers felt the most positive about home ownership at the end of last year. And we recorded, as I said, the highest number in home sentiment at 80%. What I'm going to do over the next few slides is break this down a little bit. We record sentiment according to four subcategories. I'm going to share a little bit more detail with you. So what did it say from a regional perspective? So the overall number was 80%. What you could see here for you guys in Haoting is that you were slightly above the average at 81%. And we could see this in the number of applications that we started to receive through Haoting. Haoting actually as a region had the most number of applications growth through 2020. And that was phenomenal to see. Quarter on quarter, you guys increased 3%. So in Q3 to Q4, you guys increased 3%. What was very interesting to see, if I just touch very quickly on the Western Cape number, is Western Cape is just slightly below the national average. But quarter on quarter, so for over one quarter's growth, three months, their home owner sentiment increased by 10%. And that just shows you again that the sentimental value around home ownership is really what can drive the purchasing as well as the selling of property, which we're going to go into a little bit next one on the next slide. So if we then take the home owner sentiment and we look at home owner sentiment by customer type. And here we classify it by first time home buyers, by current home owners, so existing home owners, investors as well as renters. And the graph is a little bit small. So the bottom line, the orange line is the existing home owner line. And the dark purple line with that little bit of the V in it is the investor line. And those were actually the two very interesting customer types through 2020. And if I just touch on this very quickly. So the home owners, the existing, the orange line, they have continuously lagged in home owner sentiment. And often what they refer to is the unexpected costs in the purchasing or selling of their property that kind of leaves them with a little bit of a lower sentiment as they start to make that their home and they start to live in it and they buy new furniture and they really start to create a home around that initial transaction. What was interesting though is you could see is that they were the lowest in Q1 and they slowly started to rise through the quarters. They saw the highest growth through 2020. So a very low start in Q1 to a 10% increase through the year to where they ended up in Q4. And that was very interesting to us. Often these would be the sellers that we have in the market and they kind of just held on to their properties for a little bit longer. What we are starting to see in the sentiment in Q4 though is as much as their sentiment towards home ownership has improved a lot of them are investing in their current properties. They're doing renovations and so on and so forth in their current properties. If I look at the investor line, you could see in Q2 they had this dramatic dip in home owner sentiment in Q2 and this was largely investors, again, playing a wait and see game. They didn't want to necessarily add to their investor portfolios at that moment in time. They were kind of just observing what the economy in the market was doing. A large part of the sentiment was also impacted by a decrease in rental, sorry, an increase in rental defaults. So renters not paying their rent up. And this caused investors also to take a moment of pause to understand what customer finances were doing and so on and so forth. But what we're very pleased to see is that by the end of Q4 they returned as the customer type to have the highest customer sentiment almost as much as the first time home buyers who largely drove this great recovery that we saw in H2 last year. If we go to the next slide, we start to look at the sentiment of buying and selling and this is really your game. This is really where you guys can probably tell me far more than I could tell you. And what we saw in the buying and the same buying versus sentiment graphs is that take team, I'm not sure, but I've lost the graphs on my side. I'm not sure if everybody's lost the graphs. But let me continue talking about the graph and hopefully it will come back online. From a buying versus sentiment perspective, we saw that buying took a slight dip in Q1. But by Q2 it actually recovered to pre-lockdown levels and slowly but surely the buying sentiment continued to increase and ended up 8% higher than it was at the end of last year than it was on the previous year. If we look at the selling sentiment graph, what you could see is a much slower recovery and the selling sentiment has not returned to 2019 levels. And so what happens and I'm going to use my hands to try and here comes the graph. Thank you so much guys. So the top line being the buying sentiment and the bottom line being the selling sentiment. So just to recap, the buying sentiment has actually exceeded that of Q4 2019, the top line. But the selling sentiment hasn't quite returned to where it was at the end of 2019. And what you could see in the numbers on the sides is that in Q4 2019, the difference between the buying and selling sentiment was 30%. If we now look at the end of Q4 2020, that gap has increased to 45%. And what that tells us is there's far more willing buyers in the market at the moment than there are willing sellers. And I'm sure you guys could tell me many tales about this. We saw a sweet spot last year emerging between that 800 to 1.5 million and that was largely driven by the first time home buyer market. In Q4, we saw the existing customers come back to the market for a remortgage and that started to drive a bit of that Q4 uptake. But what still remains is this distinction between the demand and the supply in the market. And we think this is going to result in a little bit of the stock shortage that's going to emerge. And we're looking to our developers to bring some stock into the market specifically within this price range as this buying versus selling demand starts to play out. On the next slide, we're going to start the kickoff into going, okay, now we've kind of understood what happened last year. We understand what the customer sentiment is. And often this customer sentiment is a leading indicator about what we're going to see going forward. So let me touch on very quickly what are we anticipating from our perspective going forward. If we talk a little about interest rates, I mean, we've had a dramatic drop in interest rates through 2020. 3% is significant, probably the lowest we've been in the interest rate cycle. And interest rates largely is what has driven this increased demand through the property industry. Customers with a lower interest rate can afford more. So what we started to see was renters who started to look at their monthly rentals and then starting to acknowledge that for the same amount of rental, they could possibly pay a mortgage repayment off. And so what we started to see this migration of renters now affording to buy their first properties and that drove the recovery in Q2 and Q3. In Q4 largely what was driven again from the interest rate perspective was these existing homeowners now looking to upscale. So work from home has had a dramatic impact on the customer sentiment around home ownership. If you've been locked down at home and you're working from home, you now start to think about, well, actually what I really need is a study so I can close the door so the kids don't bother me during work from home. Or I need maybe a garden where the kids can go run around and play. You know, what is my lifestyle that I'm now looking for? And this interest rate drop has allowed customers the affordability to start thinking of much more about the lifestyle. Largely what we saw also with regards to the Western Cape Drive was what we deem as immigration. And immigration is where I can now work from home. I no longer need to be 20 minutes or 45 minutes from work, but I could actually be in another province and I could dial into teams or into any of the virtual platforms and I can conduct my meetings as such. And so we've seen this migration from immigration and this is largely driven again by the affordability that the interest rates have afforded us. We think we've bottomed out on the interest rates. We think possibly the first increases that we may start to see would only be towards the end of this year. And we're only then going to see gradual increases in the interest rates, probably only returning to pre-lockdown levels towards the end of 2023. So I really think that this is going to drive a little bit of this recovery and this boom that we're starting to see in the property industry. What does this mean for property, for house prices? Again, it's been very interesting when we went into lockdown level five. One of our forecasts that we were actually going to see a decrease in house prices. Customer finances being impacted, a decrease in demand and this was really going to see a lowering of the house prices. With the amazing recovery that we saw in H2, we actually haven't seen this. In fact, our average house prices went from pre-lockdown levels of just below one million to currently our average ticket value being at 1.1 million. So we've seen a slight increase in house prices, again largely driven by the first-time home buyers upholding this house prices. Whether this demand is going to see a continuous increase in house prices will remain to be seen. But it is very interesting that it has remained and slightly increased in that lower bracket. What is this going to do though for the next level of house prices? So this 1.5 into the 2.5 into the 3 million, that's going to be interesting to see as affordability starts to come up as existing customer houses may leverage their current properties to upscale as well. If we now move into what we are anticipating from a market growth perspective by province. And in this graph, we've done this analysis based on the Apsa regional split. So what you'll see is Khao Deng as well as North. North we define as anything from Madrid upwards, anything north of the Yixi as we like to say. But from a heart of Khao Deng perspective predominantly around the Johannesburg area and so on and so forth. What you see in the bottom row is what the market growth was last year and despite this amazing recovery that we talk about in H2. Not any of the provinces actually saw a recovery that returned us to back to 2019 levels and that's why you see this decrease in the red bars. What you see in the top line is what we anticipate for 2021. And what you can see across all the provinces is a positive growth in all of the provinces for 2021, forgive me. Speaking to Khao Deng specifically, they saw a minus 4.3% decrease in market growth last year, not as drastic as some of the other major regions. But we anticipate that there's going to be almost a 6% growth coming into 2021. From a north perspective, which is largely Pretoria, as I said, Madrid upwards, there was a more significant decrease in 8.5% last year. And we think that the growth is going to be about 4.8% going forward. I must disclaim though that, you know, currently what we've seen in December last year, application volumes were 47% higher than application volumes in December in 2019. So year on year, we saw double the amount of applications coming through. And that just shows you that significant momentum carrying through into 2021. In the first full two months of 2021, so January and February of this year, we saw 21% more applications coming through in January and February than January and February last year. You need to remember that January and February last year was pre lockdown. So in a normal course of proceedings, year on year, we've still seen a higher increase. So we actually think that our crystal ball is still a little bit murky. We're still going to need to polish it off. And we actually think the market growth is going to be higher than what we're seeing in these numbers at the moment. The one thing that I take to heart throughout the crisis of last year throughout the pandemic and the impact that we saw globally is in South Africa, the sentiment of home ownership remains firm. And I think this is what we started to see in the activity and the recovery of the market is that South Africans still want to own their own home. And this sentiment is going to be central in driving all of our growth going forward. There are a few headwinds that we still need to think about. Are we going to see a third wave? What is happening in the deeds offices? We still see every month a few of the deeds offices closing for a few days. So those are still some of these residual consequences that we're seeing coming out of the pandemic. But largely if we think about the year ahead, we think it's largely going to be a positive view. And once again, I want to take a moment to thank all of you out there in the front line, seeing the customers helping them with their dreams. And thank you for joining us for continuing to make home ownership a possibility in this country. So as apps are home loans, we aspire to house the nation and shape the industry in a meaningful way. And we really thank you for continuing to do what you do every day. Trace. Thank you so much. Thank you, Miss Caroline King. Can we just have a round of applause for Miss Caroline King in the chat? Let's do it. Let's do it. Thank you so much, Caroline. It's always a real pleasure to hear you speak. And we look forward to your session again this afternoon. But thank you. Thank you. You sound very not bankish, which is great. We appreciate that. Thanks Trace. Thank you everyone for saying thank you to Caroline. I think that was a really awesome session. I don't see very many questions specifically directed at you though, Caroline. But I know that your team is in the room. And if there's anyone that wants to connect with you directly, they're welcome to do so. Am I right? Absolutely. I also have my regional managers, Narissa David, as well as Istiak Sator. I think we might just bring them up so they could give everybody a quick way. Narissa is our regional manager for North. Istiak is my regional manager for Xiaoding. And you know, if there is anything you guys would like to know, anything they can help you with, please reach out to any of us at any time. Trace, thank you so much for the opportunity as always. Narissa, you want to just say hello, say hello to the people. Just smile and wave. Hi everybody. Fantastic. And then Istiak, are you coming on? We want to see your face. Let's have a look at Istiak. Is he coming on? Hello. He's walking up the stairs. Oh, there you are. Fantastic. Thank you. It's nice to meet you, Istiak, even though virtually say hello to the people. Anita says you're a little bit shy. Oh, no, no. I'm not sorry. Okay, guys, thank you so much, Apsa. Let me just say thank you again for partnering with us, private property and bringing this series of connection engagements with the customers to the full. Really appreciate you. Let me let you off the stage. I was waiting for you guys. Can you all, can you share a limo? You don't mind sharing a limo, right? Thank you. Socially distant, not at all. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Caroline. And if you have any questions for Caroline, for Narissa or for Istiak, you can actually just reach out to them straight here in the participants box, or you can just drop them a mail. I'm sure that the team will pop in their email addresses. Thank you so much. I've been doing good for time. I see you guys are all still here. Thank you so, so much. Remember, there's a prize up for the most engaged, like the person who says the most likes the most, comments the most, drops the most emojis, slides into the most DMs. There's a prize up for that. There's also a prize up for the best question. And I think I have a very strong contender for this question. This question already received 15 votes, but I see the one on top also received 16 votes. And I think we can possibly deal with them in one go. The question is from Ludovic Hutton. Ludovic is saying, I'm a young entrepreneur and is currently working for for company, but would eventually like to start my own agency. What is the best process for this? And what would I need? Another question, I would like to increase my sales, any suggestions. And then the last question is, I'm fairly new in the industry stock in my focus area. How do you succeed in this? How can I up my game? Two of those questions were asked anonymously. One was asked with the name. And guess what? I'm going to do something that I've never done before. I'm going to bring up one of our delegates. I'm not going to tell you who I'm going to bring him up after the break. And he is going to encourage, he's going to tackle those three questions for us. He's going to give Ludovic a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of information, a little bit of inspiration. I think that's a really fun thing to look forward to. So thank you so much, Apsa. Thank you so much for sharing those insights with us. And like I said, if you want to connect with the Apsa team, please go ahead and do so. That's what this whole Nexus thing is about. All right. So now I'm going to ask you to do something for me. Please take your cellular phones. Please take your cell phones. Put them in your hand. Go to www.menti.com. Zakir, I see your question there. I'm a student and still studying at the university. I would like to find out what is the best method in finding new clients and building my database as I'm now doing it on a part-time basis. Very interesting. Okay. So I think that that that question, we can tackle all of that question together. You are the experts in the room. This is an opportunity for us to speak to each other where we can talk to each other. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I think that we, you know, we don't often have the chance to speak to each other. So do you have your mentee in front of you? Have you got your cell phone? The code is 45628137. In the olden days when we did physical events, they used to tell us, please put your cell phones on me. Put away your cell phones. And this time around, we're saying, actually get out your cell phones because this is part of engagement. Studio. Let's have a look at how many people are on the mentee already. And let's get started. There we go. I can see the screen. Let me try and make this screen a little bit bigger. There we are. All right. Please enter your name to sign up. Please enter a nice name, not a fancy, not a, not a weird name or a naughty name, a name that's an actual name. There we go. Wendy, you're there. You're there. Nadia, you're there. Almira, you're there. 47 people in. Let's give it a few more minutes. 49 people. I think we've got so many people in the room today. Let's try and push this mentee up to about 60 studio. We'll wait for you. We will wait for you. Come on, are you in? I don't see Carl. You're in. There we go. We're on 60. You can catch us on the flip side. Let's go to the next question. Let's go to the first question at least. And the first question is we, you know, we want to get to know you a little bit better. So who's in the room? What is your job title? What is your role currently in the space where you are in? Currently you're in a state agent. Intern. You're a principal agent or a managing broker. If my daughter was in the room, she would be ticking the CEO box. She doesn't know CEO of what, but she'll be the CEO box. Other. There's a few others in the room as well. Thank you. Look at that. We're up to 74, 76 respondents. And the majority of you are actually working within the industry in that capacity. Let's go to the next question. Thank you. Thank you for telling us who you are and what type of real estate transactions do you currently specialize in? Boom. Sales and rentals. It's amazing to see the responses coming through in real time. And it makes, I think it makes me feel like my voice is currently being heard. Fantastic. Sales, sales and rentals. Okay. So between sales and sales and rentals, that's the majority of the responses we got on this question. Let's go to the next question. Okay. Okay. This is my favorite. Do you multitask when you attend virtual meetings or events online? Please be honest. Just be honest with me. It's just between you, me and the doorpost. No one needs to know. Let's see. Yes, I'm guilty. 37, 42. I am a little bit guilty because, you know, you literally compare competing with Tiktok. You're competing with Facebook. You're competing with other meetings. At least in the olden days, we could schedule time between meetings. Let's go to the next question, please. Thank you to those of you who are 100% focus, razor focused. I appreciate that. Right. You guys are the experts. So tell us in your opinion, is it a buyer's or a seller's market? Buyer's a seller's market. All right. Majority of you saying it's a buyer's market. Yes, we must put a third option for both. Emmanuel, there you go. I see you in the room. You're telling us both. Ian, are you saying both Christopher buyers? Okay. Awesome. I think we're going to have a nice bit of feedback to give you at the end of this because of course we've done the next season for all the regions all across the country. Buyer's neither here nor there. Noel Joel, you're not neither here nor there. Okay. Next one we're almost done with this part of the session. After this we're going to go into a break and I'm going to give you some homework for this break. Right. Here's the next question. In one word, think about it. How would you describe 2021 so far? Not 2020, 2021. Not 2020, 2021. And please keep it. Please keep it. Keep it classy. Keep it clean. No strange words. No swear words. Fantastic. I see awesome is popping out in a very big way. Excellent. There's also a couple of comments here in the chat. Challenging but okay. Good. Fantastic. I think challenging is popping up for a lot of people. Of course how this word cloud works is if the word gets entered more than once, it takes prominence in the visual. So from that we can see that a lot of you think it's challenging, interesting, busy, exciting, awesome, but there is a certain level of unpredictability about it. All right. All right, let's go to the next one. Good upswing. I like that. Gail Morgansmith, you're saying it's phenomenal. I like that. All right, here we go. And you know, I'm not asking, I'm just going to give you one thing, one thing that you can change if you could about the South African real estate industry. Right now, what would it be? What would it be? Think about it. If you want to enter your response into mentee do so. If you want to enter your response into chat do so. Okay. So let me read some of these overwhelming, overwhelmingly saying that the EAAB, EAAB and deeds office, integrity, efficiency. Okay. Okay. Professionals registration process, turn around time on transfers. It's fairly consistent. Your responses with the other regions actually. So, you know, you have, you maybe, maybe you're onto something here. Okay. Let's go to the last, I think that was the last question wasn't at studio. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I believe that was the last mentee question. I'm going to take a short break now. And in the break, let's try not to discuss just negative things. We can all complain and complain and complain, but let's talk about positive things. Your homework for the break is answering one of the questions that have been asked over here. How has online tech agencies influenced the industry? You can discuss that if you like. You could also discuss how can I better qualify my buyers? I've had so many sales, but more than 50% declined. Should I better match my buyers to a more affordable, to more affordable properties? I think you, Zakir, is it Zakir that asked that question? No, Sharon Erasmus. Sharon, our own Carl van der Berg actually is going to talk about this, is going to talk about partnership and how we see partnership in the industry. I think that's going to be a really awesome session. So please don't go away. We're going to take a short break now for about five minutes. Remember, if you switch your camera on, if you switch your microphone on, then the people sitting at your table will see you. If you do not switch your microphone on and you do not switch your camera on, you'll be able to hear the conversation, but you won't be able to participate. If you want to move to a different table, if you want to move to a different table, you don't want to be at the table, you don't want to be at the table, you don't want to be at the table. You don't want to be at a different table. You don't want to be at the table that you are in. You literally just have to go to the, hang your cursor on the table where you want to be. Double click on that table. It'll sound like a knocking, like a knocking sound. And if there's space at the table, you'll be able to get in. All right, guys, I'm going to take a five minute break. I'm going to refold my coffee and then Willem you're saying next time, please include auctions in the options. I definitely will. Willem, thank you. I definitely will. All right, guys, let me see a thumbs up. If you understand, we're back. When we come back, I have a very special guest that is going to answer Lodovic's question for us and he's someone in the room with you right now. See you in five. Hello everyone. Hello. And welcome to the, this cutting Nexus is on fire. Thank you so much. And for everyone or to everyone. You're still here. You're still participating. I love what's happening in the chat. I'm going to quickly bring on our surprise guest who is going to answer Lodovic's question. And just to remind ourselves, Lodovic hadn't asked. I'm a young entrepreneur and is currently working for a company, but would eventually like to start my own agency. What is the best process for this and what would I need? And the person who put up his hand to give it a stab. Let's bring him onto the stage. His name is Andre van Royen and he runs an agency called Grounded Property Professionals based here in Ilovo. Studio, let's bring on our special guest. There we go. Andre, you've got two minutes to give Lodovic that encouragement. Give him the benefit of your. Hello, hello everybody. Tracy and Proud property. This is a great forum. Lodovic, just there's two parts to my answer. Obviously, there's a couple of formalities that you have to deal with. You have to be a registered principal estate agent to comply with the estate agents and phase board requirements. You have to register a company. P2Y will suffice and then register a name with the estate agents of phase board. So that's the formalities. You have to then have a trust account for up and running and you now have an entity that can trade as an estate agency. That's the first part of the question. The next part of the question is rather some advice and the advice is don't do it. We get that a lot. We get a lot of senior estate agents asking us, and we sort of feel that the evolution of an estate agent is that we're a top sales agent and then we want to have an agency. We want to run an agency. But the answer really is if you're a top sales agent at the moment, try and sell more. Don't tie yourself up with the formalities and don't tie yourself up with the overheads of running in a state agency while your skill set is really based in sales. What I'd suggest is maybe build a team under you, maybe grow your team. The estate agents of phase board promote that, you know, get a couple of rookies under you and then build your team from there. So, yeah, that's my advice. I hope it helps. Thank you so much, Andre. I appreciate. I know I put you on the spot there and I put you under time pressure as well. But thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I hope in future, Nexus, we're able to do more of this, more of this kind of engagement. All right, guys. Andre, you can get in the limo now and you can go back to Ilovo. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you, thank you. So, I've got to move this program along real quick. So, let me bring on to the stage your head smarts and she is the head of data and analytics at Pay Prep and she will then introduce us to the CEO, Jan Davel and he will also talk to us about the future of real estate very, very quickly. Andre, you're still here. Andre is gone now. Okay. Andre is gone now. Thank you, Andre. Cornelia Maria Mazdor while we wait for your head, let me see what's happening in these chats. Andre, you're saying you don't agree with Andre. I hear you. I totally agree with Andre says Nadia though. Thank you, Andre says Claudia and Yvette. Okay, there we go. This is engagement. You can hear your head. Take it away. Good morning, Tracy. Thank you so much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking time out of your day to listen to what we have to say and again, thank you private property for the opportunity. I'm going to share my screen in a second and I'm also going to switch off my camera so that my presentation is nice and big on all of your screens. Just need to find the right screen. There we go. All right. So as Tracy mentioned, I am from PayProp. I'll be taking you through what happened in the rental market in the year 2020. There's also something exciting for you at the end and that is our set of the rental industry survey results. It hasn't been released yet but I put a sneak preview for you guys today. So I'll talk to you about rent on a national level and then also provincially and the same for arrears as well before we get into the fun stuff at the end. So let's start with rent. The graph in front of you is over the past two years. So we're looking at inflation in blue and rental growth in red. So you can clearly see here in 2019 rental growth year on year measured between 3% and 4% at that time. And then here at the beginning of Jan you can see it's really started dipping and then the effect of lockdown is just very visible right on the graph and the same goes for inflation. This is during the time that we couldn't even buy shorts or long pants. I can't remember which way in the shop. So obviously the very low demand for goods and services as well. Historically significant event here at PayPal is that we saw negative rental growth in November for the first time ever since we started the PayPal rental index in 2012. So what this means is that between November 2019 and November 2020 rental growth or rent levels actually decreased by 0.3% so rent became cheaper. Why is rental growth cheaper? So there are a few reasons for it. There's a demand side and a supplier side to this. So looking at the demand side affordability is after the year that we had last year a huge factor. Many tenants lost their income or lost part of their income or their partners lost their income but either way tenants are under immense financial pressures. So it's possible that they would lose their income and instead of paying a larger rental increase they might opt to move to a cheaper property or just to a different property at the same price. Also like I said they won't be looking to move to larger and more expensive properties due to affordability. On the supplier side I think we all know of Airbnb properties and rental markets so that pushed up the supply and put down with pressure on price. And secondly due to the very low interest rates that we've been having investors are buying by-to-let properties and then also pushing those into the long-term rental market over supplying the market with properties. So both the low demand and the high supply put down with pressure on price. So if you see this changing anytime soon the short answer is no basically just due to the fact that both these factors affordability and over-supply properties are very inelastic in the short term and they take some time to reach a new equilibrium. If we look at the same statistics just quarterly we can see the trend that we spoke about earlier very clearly here you can see 2019 rental growth trend at between 3 and 4% and into the beginning of 2020 and then after lockdown hit rental growth literally halved between the first and the second quarter of the year and at the end of the year in that 0.2% if we measure again the year on year so from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2020 the average rent is 0.2% or 10 rand comparing how 10 rental stats good news is that how 10 rental growth are performed the national average for most of the last two years the effective lockdown is also quite clear here you can see that it's been trending downward of the last three quarters and in the year at 0.7% year on year growth to put this into perspective eventually five out of the nine provinces experienced negative rental growth last year so the fact that Haating actually saw an increase in rental prices was really something to mention the Western Cape is the only province with rent over with over 9,000 rand Haating the second most expensive province in the country and national average rent ending the year at 154 rand moving on to areas so this is quite a top this is quite topical because as I mentioned many tenants lost their income and this affected areas in a big way so when we look at areas of paper we look at two matrix so first the percentage tenants in areas how many tenants go on areas in the pool of tenants and then secondly we look at rental areas relative to rent so if we look at the first graph at the beginning of the year last year pre lockdown we saw that one in five tenants more or less had some sort of rental areas then lockdown was announced and that jumped up to 25% so one in four tenants were in rental areas that then improved towards the end of the year ending at 249% so it is definitely better and it's definitely peaked but it's still not at a pre lockdown level and I'll explain the reason for the trend in this graph in a second if we look at the other areas matrix the average area size just to give you an example this 78% means that in the first quarter of 2020 a tenant who were in arrears owed 78.5% of one month's rent so almost 80% of one month's rent was his arrears balance again this increased to quarter two just after lockdown was announced and this matrix actually peaked in the third quarter so it's peaked I'm hoping it's going to continue to improve but this is a lot more this metric is a lot more sticky than the percentage in arrears in the third 96% still quite a lot higher than at the beginning of last year at 78% I'm sorry there we go comparing how 10 rentals to the national average if we look at the dark red graph we can see that the same pattern was followed the percentage of tenants in arrears started at the year 18% below the national average also peaked in the second quarter and also improved down to the fourth quarter ended at just under 20% still off the 18% that we saw at the beginning of the year looking at average arrears size we can see that this for half day this was just above the national average over the period of 20% peaked in the third quarter and then at the end of the year the average tenant who were in arrears owed exactly one month's rent so why do we see the patterns here that we see a lot of the if we look at the percentage tenants in arrears a lot of the the reason behind the peak in the second quarter is due to cash flow uncertainty so when lockdown was announced at the end of March many tenants weren't necessarily sure when they will receive their next income will they receive a full income how long will they be without a salary and that cash flow uncertainty made them stop paying their rent in full then once the economy opened again in May it was announced that everyone can go back to work on the first of June now again tenants had cash flow and the rent in full again and where they could paid off their arrears these were the tenants who still had jobs many other tenants lost their job and still under financial pressure and if we look at the pattern of the average arrears percentage that peaked in the third quarter these tenants who went back to work in June with their low levels of arrears and who were able to pay off their arrears did so dramatically if you remove the low levels of arrears the average will spike a bit so that's what we saw then remaining arrears as I said is sticky it's difficult to pay it off if you think about it to pay off your arrears you need to pay your rent in full and then you have to pay extra cash on top of that to reduce that negative balance and for many tenants that is still difficult to do in the current economic on circumstances and then I'll end off with the state of the rental industry survey results so this was the second one that we did the first one we did the end of 2019 and obviously many lockdown related questions and we can see the effects of lockdown and the pandemic on the survey participants so just quickly who took part in this 95% of the participants who worked in the property industry 69% were either a business owner or a rental agent so that's the majority roles of the participants and then 64% managed rental books smaller than 150 properties technology after the year that was last year's obviously obviously a big topic and a big category in the survey results just want to share three points with you looking at tick during COVID 55% of participants said that they increased the use of technology in their business these are actually the ones who fully agreed another 25% said that they agree so all in all 80% of people increased the use of technology in their business during COVID 70% said that virtual beings and 3D tours are here to say so even if we go back to normal and I say that in quotation marks virtual beings and 3D tours will still be with us and then lastly on productivity 69% said it is more productive to increase automation than to increase the workforce this is just an example of working smart and not hard using technology to empower your people to be more productive then on rental portfolios 70% this is actually quite a high number 70% of participants said that the rental increases that they put through in 2020 was lower than the rental increases they normally do this goes back to the affordability and the fact that tenants just can't afford high rental increases and that was also evidence in that rental growth graph 93% said that they made alternative payment arrangements with tenants during during the lockdown period which just shows you just how many tenants were actually affected by income losses and job losses 55% said that they saw more vacant properties than they normally do and that could also be and one of the effects of the oversupply that I spoke about earlier and lastly 64% said that they lowered the commission during the year last year to keep a mandate so because commission is your main source of income in a rental business this is quite problematic because once you've lowered that commission percentage you're increasing it again in the future looking at the challenges 51% said finding good tenants is the single biggest challenge that they currently have last year this was only second or this was in second place and only 27% or 24% of people said that this was their biggest challenge so you can see that after the year that was defined their own homes that this really is becoming a challenge for rental agents and then 68% said that the biggest worry going into 2021 is the ongoing effect of COVID on their business and I'll end with some good news how optimistic are our participants about the future of the rental market only 5% said pessimistic 17% said they were quite neutral about it and then an overwhelming 78% said that they were optimistic about the future of the rental market so if you compare this 78% to the previous year pre-lockdown to that response that was 62% at the end of 2019 so I don't know if COVID made us all think differently about life and appreciate the little things but it is good to see that almost 80% of the server respondents are optimistic about the future of the rental market if you want to read a bit more about the rent areas and also credit metrics you are welcome to download the latest paper I'll drop the link for you in the chat in a second and then I'm going to hand over to my CEO Jan who will be talking to you about a few things in the near future thank you well thank you thank you good morning everybody I'm talking to you from nice and sunny Stelenbosch if we could maybe just stop shooting that screen please there we go thank you it's such a lovely day in Stelenbosch I think I'm actually supposed to have a short meeting that's with my surf board it's a beautiful day but we are here now so I want to take this opportunity of thanking Amasi, Tracy Lee all the other beautiful people at Private Property for this awesome opportunity and it's lovely to see many familiar names and faces on this at this event so I did not prepare a PowerPoint presentation but I tried to I would have had to title my presentation Deaf by PowerPoint because unfortunately I'm going to deal with some of the less pleasant things that's legislation and regulations of our industry so taking a future look what we can expect later this year I am going to deal with the Property Practitioners Act and its draft regulations very briefly now it is important also to mention that we are going to be pointing out what has been published everything I'm going to show you by sharing my screen is published it's public information it's available on the internet and I recommend that you carefully need to spend some time on it if necessary seek legal advice have a chat to your auditor and I think there is some good news for some of you Property Practitioners well as you all know it's already on 3 October 2019 now that being the case you may be wondering why we as state agents are still working in accordance with the old Act the Estate Agency Affairs Act and I think we will all agree that the 45 year old piece of legislation is long overdue for replacement as it dates back to an era before the internet before digital marketing before social media and very importantly for purposes before automated and integrated payment platforms the old act simply does not cater for today's realities and the question is what can we expect going forward now considering the property practitioners act and any other new act we must remember that an act in itself only sets out the broad principles of the new law it does not deal with the implementation that is where regulations to an act come in setting out the implementation and the application of the act now although the property practitioners act was published in October 2019 its regulations have not been finalized or published yet only once they are published in the government gazette will the act be implemented and that's when all of us need to comply with the new act when is that likely to be implemented but what we do know is that the draft regulations to the property practitioners act were published for public comment already in March last year 2020 but due to the COVID-19 and the lockdown regulations the opportunity to submit comments was extended to 20 November last year and I'm sure that many of us participated in commenting on these regulations we now await the final regulations but let's have a look at what we can expect now without trying to make you seasick I'm going to just share a screen with you and I'm going to start with the act that tells us the intention of the legislator and I'm going to start with something relatively familiar to you in principle and that is section 54 of the act and I'm trying to share I'll keep an eye on you soon and I'll start with section 54 that deals with trust accounts generally speaking and this is particularly important for estate agents in the rental market now section 54 is more comprehensive than the old section 32 of the estate agency affairs act but in essence it's the same it's materially the same slightly more comprehensive but no surprises so if we look at section 54 the property practitioner must open and keep one or more separate trust accounts which must contain a reference to this particular section and it must be with a bank registered in terms of the bank act and then you must immediately after opening this trust account must appoint an auditor and then once you've opened the trust account and appointed the auditor you must provide the authority with all the information and the board authority is just a single word that would be a much longer term but when we see authority we're talking of what we now know as the AIIB then subsection 2 deals with money that is not immediately required in other words very similar to section 32 sub 2 when you have interest bearing accounts with all longer terms and then the section 54 carries certain things that you must do and I'm going to scroll up slowly as you know the act is also published in different languages but then you can carry on here and following section 54 you will see that there are certain things that you must do and then the authority may do certain things and courts may do certain things I'm not going to read it to you in the interests of time it's just important that you entire when you talk of your trust accounts the intention of the legislature is quite clear here but should you scroll up and visit section 23 now I'm not going to scroll that far I'm just going to move to a different screen and I want to show the provisions of section 23 now the heading already tells us that there's something new that's coming the heading says exemptions in respect of accounting records never before were you able to be exempted from accounting records and trust accounts so this is new section 23 one states that a property practitioner who's turnover is below 2.5 million grand must pose his or her 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 trustments turn over below 2.5 million per annum obviously and then it talks of an independent review by a registered accountant it doesn't talk of a formal audit by a chartered accountant so it's quite clear that the legislature has some intention here and if we then move on to section 23 sub 2 it states that the minister may by notice in the Gazette and that would be the government Gazette determine the circumstances under which certain property practitioners may be exempted from keeping trust accounts now that's very new and the minister may by notice determine a different dispensation for the review of accounting records for those property practitioners so it talks of exemption if you qualify and it talks of use by registered accountants now that is a much cheaper much simpler or less onerous procedure and I think that might be very good news for the smaller operators the newcomers practitioners whose turnover is below 2.5 million and what's also interesting there if your turnover is below 2.5 million per annum and that's your own turnover that's the money's your account it says must cause this so the intention is quite clear now as I've explained before we now need to see whether this intention is actually explained to us and whether it's underpinned in the new regulations now just a reminder that the new regulations is on draft form has been for a very long period but in terms of these specific provisions I can confirm that in the previous draft the contents have been consistent so we quite comfortable that the regulations are very final on these aspects once again this is not legal advice you need to consider these regulations carefully and seek legal advice have a conversation with your commercial attorney and your account and your auditor but let's see what it says regulation 4 of the regulations of 2020 the heading says exemption from trust accounts pursuant to the provisions of section 23 that we've just read the following is prescribed any property practitioner and by now you would know that's an estate agent with a very broad definition any property practitioner is exempted from keeping a trust account that property practitioner has never received any trust monies other as permitted in regulation 4.4 so 4.4 regulation 4.4 which we will deal with shortly is an exception but if you've never received any trust monies you may be or you can be exempted subparagraph 2 subregulation 4.1.1.2 says property practitioner is exempted from keeping a trust account if such property practitioner no longer receives any trust monies other than as permitted in regulation 4.4 so never before or you've quit doing it you've quit doing it then you may be exempted and there's more more conditions that property practitioner submits to the authority the EIAB at the time of applying to the agency and affidavit in a pre-scribed form in terms of which affidavit the property practitioner asserts certain things now I'm not going to read it word by word but it's basically saying that you are compliant with the other regulations you give an undertaking that you will not be receiving trust accounts in your own trust account and 3 you provide evidence that the account is closed and then let's look at 4.2 where a property practitioner is exempted in terms of the above and provided that the historical trust accounts have been closed down such property practitioner will not be required to again have such account reviewed or audited so you can park it as history Regulation 4.3 where a property practitioner is exempted in terms of the above and has complied with the above such property practitioner will be exempted from having to have its business and other accounts audited and will only be required to have such account independently reviewed by a registered accountant no longer formal audit no longer chartered accountant less owner is far cheaper much simpler now we get to the important one 4.4 this is very important for rental agencies a property practitioner will further be exempted from operating a trust account if such property practitioner is otherwise compliant with the above and if such property practitioner has mandated one or more other property practitioners that specialize in collecting and distributing trust payments and such property practitioners will be called the payment processing agents to process such trust payments on the estate agency's behalf in respect of all trust funds received by that property practitioner now a by-crop is such a payment processing agent and what is important here quite clear in terms of these drop regulations is that the property practitioner will be exempted from operating a trust fund and the property practitioner must also be exempted from operating a trust fund under the conditions of these drop regulations that the payment processing agent must also be a property practitioner in other words registered as an estate agency with this authority with a valid FFC etc and should you use a payment process to the second condition. Each payment processing agent, that's your pay props, mandated by you, the property practitioner, operates a trust environment that complies with the act and the associated regulations. So your payment processor has to be registered as an agency with an FFC and then it has to provide a trust environment that applies with this act and this regulations. Trust environment we will deal with now in more detail. 4.4.3. Each payment processing agent like pay prop mandated by the estate agency must within its trust environment have separately auditable client accounts, which means for each estate agency that uses a company like pay prop, they must be a separately auditable account for each estate agency. But then it says both in respect of each property practitioner to provide such services, that's your estate agents and in respect of each client of each such property practitioner. So what we're talking of is the segregation of trust funds. So a company like pay prop must have a separately auditable account for each estate agency that utilizes a platform, but then for and on behalf of each such estate agency, there must be a separately auditable client account for every single landlord and every single tenant. And the trust environment, the complete environment of all the different agencies trust account and each of those client accounts operated by the processing agent must be audited annually in compliance with the act and regulations and the audit reports in respect of or submitted to the authority in compliance with the act and the regulations and then lastly the property practitioner concerned the one who uses a payment platform like pay prop cannot hold any further trust monies whatever outside of the manner provided for in these regulations. Now the good news for all those of you who have been using pay prop is that for the past 16 years, 17 years now, pay prop has been compliant with all these regulations. So we do have the trust environment, we do have the separate audit accounts, we do have the compliance, we can provide audits on your trust funds. So the good news is that subject to you following the procedure and completing this affidavit which is amateur E1 on page 11 of these draft regulations, you will hopefully be soon able to follow these procedures, get your exemption, save a lot of costs, carry on with your life, spend your time and money on building your business. And on that note, I just want to remind you that this is not legal advice. This is simply pointing out to what is publicly available. Thank you for your time. I thank our private property and I'm going to sign off now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jan. Just from the chat, I can see so many people saying, wow, I didn't know this. This is new information, very useful. We are up against the clock though. So Jan, I'm going to ask anyone that has any questions for you that they reach out to you, use the participants' clock and then just click on Jan's name there and he can, I think yesterday you also had a link to share. Jan, if you can do that for us, who thinks we should do a nexus just on that act? Who wants to do a nexus just on that act? All right. Studio, I think let's bring on our last speaker, my brother from another mother, the person I call colleague, the person I've become quite close to and I call him friend. He's actually in our Durban offices today. Look at how beautiful those offices are. Carl Fandenberg, Johannesburg is lit. The shouting nexus is lit and we knew it. Please, can you put your hands together for the colleagues from PayPal. Thank you, Johan. Thank you, Johit. And let's hand over to Carl who's going to tell us a little bit about what's happening with private property and what can we look forward to from a private property for space. Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much, Tracy Lee and a big thank you to everybody for joining us today. It's an absolute privilege for us to be able to share information and just be with you guys. Obviously, we're a business that's built on relationships. That's been especially tough for us not to be able to have a cup of coffee with you and just share our stories and our knowledge and just engage. So we're very, very fortunate that we found this this RIMO platform and we've come up with nexus. It's an absolute treat for us and a big thank you to Absen for to pay proper joining us. So, you know, I'm going to spend a bit of time today just talking around the new private property, where it is that we are now and where it is more importantly that we're going to be going in the future. And then I'll be joined by our provincial head for Khartien Tordia and then she's going to run through quite a lot of information that speaks to knowledge and insights to your specific area. So let's get cracking straight away on it. So as a private property, we're essentially choosing to become trusted partners in the property industry. And really what what that means is that we're in the center of the ecosystem with everything to do with property from buyers and sellers to real estate agents, to attorneys and banks and mortgage originators, everybody in anything to do with property is in the center of our ecosystem. We're in the center of the ecosystem on that. And Nexus is a really, really good example of what it is that our role is as a trusted partner. So we bring in our partners such as Absen and PayProp, bring your souls in as our clients and just share the information and the knowledge that we have so that we can all be better business people have better efficiencies in our business. So this is really the role of private property is to be this trusted partner. So, you know, we've essentially got two sides to this when we're in the center. The one side is what we consider to be our consumers. So those are people wanting to buy property, wanting to rent a property, essentially the 57 million people in our country that are either interested in property, buying property or one will one day be our clients. And the other side is yourselves as our partners as real estate and the rest of that. And it's something a bit of a tightrope that we put a walk a lot of the time because essentially not always are the best interests of the consumer the same interests as the clients. So as an example, if we listen too much to the needs and wants of let's say real estate, we run the risk of completely alienating the consumer based and what do people do? They vote with their feet and they go elsewhere and that doesn't benefit anybody. Likewise, if we focus too much on the client, we run the absolute risk of alienating ourselves as clients. So it is a tightrope that we walk it's something that we choose to do and it's something that we do particularly well. You know, what are the how do you become a trusted partner in real estate? So to us, there's three elements to these things. The first is to be absolutely, absolutely consumer obsessed. And it really is about knowing our clients, knowing our consumers, knowing ourselves as clients, what are your pain points? What do you need out of industry? What needs to happen? And an event like this really gives us a lot of insights in terms of what it is that that is the best for our clients and our consumers engagements on Facebook with our consumers gives us a huge amount of insight as well around what are South Africans pain points around property ownership? Once you completely understand the consumer, you then have the ability to solve real people's problems. And that's really exciting for us. And we choose to do this through solving problems with using digital technology to help with these things. Now, once you understand the consumers obsession that clients and consumers, once you're able to solve their problems with digital technology, that's where the magic starts happening. And then you're able to create some really, really exciting value propositions that aids everybody. And one of our nexuses early on in the week, there was, you know, that that mental question that came up that spoke to, you know, what are the pain points for 2021? And somebody came up with the fact that it's a painful point for them that they have people coming in and signing off to purchases, but not knowing whether they can actually afford it. So an example around how we see things progressing in our industry is, could you imagine the ability to have, before somebody has an off to purchase, that they, you know, that they've been pre qualified. So as an example, you get a lead from private property. We tell you that this is the person's name. This is who they are. They'd be pre qualified by apps already. They're looking for a three bedroom, two bathroom place in sunny Sunnydale. They have 2.5 children and a cat and a dog. That's the level of things that we wanted to start building for real estate. And that's, as I said, is once you understand the customer, you completely obsessed with what it is that they need, you can solve real problems by using digital technology, and then you can start creating real value propositions for everybody in the ecosystem. So let's have a look at private property's five year strategy. So we started in 2019. Essentially, we bought in a brand new CEO, and he's bought in an entire new executive team. One of the, probably the oldest one, and I've been in the business for about 18 months. So 2019 was really a time for us to sit down and examine ourselves as a business, examine our past, examine where it is that we're operating now, and more importantly, what do we want to be in five years time? So 2019 was our thinking year, 2020 was our foundation year, and I'll speak to that in my next slide. 2021 is our watershed moment. It is our year of innovation. It is our year of technology. 2022 is repositioning, 23 is optimizing, and 24 is scale. And we'll talk more about that in the years to come. But really it's important for us to look at what is 2020 and what is 2021, because these are the foundations and the exciting things for us as a business. If you have a look at the next slide there, I don't know if anybody can even remember private property being red, blue, and white. It was a year ago yesterday was our anniversary. And it's something to us that that's really, it's not a brand change. It's not a brand refresh. It's not just a new color. It's a fundamental shift on who we are, how we interact with our consumers and how we interact with our clients. It talks to a complete new business model. It talks to you products and services, talks to new technology. So really yesterday, although we're a 22 year old business, yesterday really did mark our first birthday of being a new private property and the way we go. Everybody that we engage with, it's just so excited by our new brand. They can see the change in our business. They can see the value of that we provide to real estate now more than what we did in the past few years. So really, again, it's not just a new color scheme. It's a fundamental shift in who we are. Just in part of this five year strategy, by the end of that five year strategy, we're wanting to be on five million unique users per month. Right now, we're averaging around 3.2 million unique people coming on top portal, searching for your properties every single month. So we're ahead of where it was that we expected to be this time of the year, which is really exciting. But I suppose we need to understand of where it is that we came from. This is a growth. If we consider, if we look back at March of last year, we've grown by over a million new people coming on top portal every month. If we go back as recently as two years ago, we've grown by more than 2 million unique people coming on top portal. That's staggering growth. And something we're incredibly proud of. That's just the beginning for private property. Part of the conversation I want to speak around is this whole thing around technology. So you've got these words that are thrown around, you know, Poptek and FinTech and disruption and all the rest of these things. Before we start looking at, you know, what is FinTech, what is Poptek and what is private properties role in all of this? Let's just make sure we understand, you know, where is technology now and where is the world going? Where is real estate going? Where are consumers going? So there's two sort of things that one looks at. Are we in an evolving type of technology or using, using, you know, new systems or is this a revolution? Is this an immediate change? So as an example, if we take our old 2110s and we hold our 21 Nokia 2110 up against our, you know, latest iPhone 12 and you look at those two there, you would go, wow, that is an absolute revolution in technology. The fact is though, it isn't because 2110s were made almost 25 years ago. So if you plot it out over a graph, that technology or those firstly growing and evolving is taking quite a considerable amount of time. If you talk about Mooders Law that talks around speed of technology, that was developed in the 1970s. So that really is an example of evolution of technology. An example of revolution of technology would be something that we've all gone through of late. You know, 12 months ago, I was sitting in this very same office and we had our 180 degree sea views over, over, I'm showing the rocks here. And now we, except for today, that's the first time I've been back in the office since March of last year. You know, we now work from home. We now are doing home screen. We sort of, our children are interrupting us when we're in these virtual meetings. Most of us never heard of RIMO a year ago. Most of us had never used Teams, Google Hangouts, Zoom, nothing like that. So we've had a fundamental and a rapid change in how it is that we consume and use technology. That's a revolution because it's like that. It's so quick and we then adjust. The important thing is this, although we've had to change and we've had to change in a very short amount of time, our consumers have changed. The people that are renting properties, the people that are buying properties, you know, we talk about buyers market, sellers market, these things are changing, they're changing really, really quickly. You know, a lot of people were renting. Now, if repo rate goes down by 300 basis points, now everybody's buying. These are rapid changes. Our consumers have changed. Your headspoker and earlier presentation around this need for virtual reality tours, that's an absolute fact. Consumers are wanting these metaphor tours. They're wanting these virtual tours because they want to understand the property before they reach out to a real estate agent and do that viewing. Again, that's a good thing for us in real estate because we really do need to start separating these buyers from the shoppers. You know, I can only imagine the day in the life of a real estate agent where you go and you list your property and new property and new sole mandate. And in a single day, you get 100 leads, 200 leads, 300 leads. It's not physically possible to deal with that. And we know this. A lot of those people are just mere time wasters. So our view around this is that we need to use technology so we can create efficiencies in both your world as well as our own. So this takes us to, you know, what is it that private property is doing? So we've spent the last more than a year now looking at what it is that we need to do in terms of our technology. So in the next couple of months, we're actually going to be building a brand world launching a brand new technology platform. And it comes in two different areas. The one will be completely consumer based. So that means a new way of consumers searching for your properties, a new way of finding information about an area, finding information around how do you buy? How do you finance? How do you get approval? All of those things, it will be app based and obviously be web based as well. This will allow us to understand our consumers a lot better and then pass that information on to you. So again, client face, easier way to be able to search for your properties, much better way of interacting with our property. At the same time, we're going to be launching a client which is essentially for yourselves as a real estate, a brand new platform, web based and app based. Where you get to start understanding the performance of your listings, understanding the leads, where are these leads coming from? Are people living in Sunning Hill wanting to bar in four ways? I don't know, but that's where we need to get to, is give you that rich content. So essentially, get to a point where you don't need to attend these conferences to understand what's happening in your area. But literally just be on your phone and go, what is my market share? What is the number of leads? Where am I getting these leads? What are these people? Has this person that is asking to view this property being peer-proof? Do you know an interviewer property that's not expanding? And that's where it is that we're wanting to get to. So we launched this in the next couple of months. We'll be very much engaging with yourselves as our clients over the next couple of months, just doing some change management. So it's not going to take you by surprise. But this is, again, as I said, the watershed moment for private property and something that we're really, really looking forward to. If you have a look at the next slide, there's this whole thing around, we use this word disruption, technology being disruptive. And I really do worry that disruption or this word disruption has gotten a negative connotation. A lot of people, especially in this industry, when you start talking about disruption, people go, okay, they're going to cut out the real estate agent, and it's going to be linking buyers to sellers directly and all of those things. That's simply not the truth, especially in our country. So we know a couple of things that are specific to South Africa. One, property ownership is highly emotive. Two, it is probably the single biggest purchase anybody is going to buy in their lifetime. Two, there is a human being that is selling. There's a human being that is buying. There's a human estate agent that is showing and doing all the necessary. There's a human attorney and a human, even a bank, there's a human being behind this. The use of technology needs to make the human part of things a lot more efficient and bring the humans in at the right amount of time so that you don't have 500 leads, that you've got five leads that you know are quite qualified. That is our goal. It's not saying that you just switch on the lights and we have this, but this is what private property is wanting to go first. Again, our customers and our consumers build solutions using digital capabilities and then really creating some value. Thank you again to everybody for joining us. I think we're going to bring Claudia up onto the stage. She's going to share some real insightful information on what's happening in cutting and then I'll probably be coming back for a Q&A if there are any. So again, thank you to everybody for joining us. It's been an absolute privilege for private property to host this. Thank you Tracey Lee. Can you guys, can you guys see what I love Carl so much? Carl, he's my guy. We're very excited about where this brand is going and we absolutely see partnership as key and let me bring on to the stage the beautiful Claudia who's going to look at some stats in your area from a platform perspective. So good morning, nearly afternoon everyone. Really happy to be here today. I have, today we've got a word for moving around the country and going to live elsewhere. So I have semi-graded a couple of times in my life and I am very happy and confident to say that cutting is the place where we are supposed to live. Stats are quite boring, but the insights they bring can teach us a lot and cutting is the land of equal opportunities. So let's dive straight into it and look at the sales and rental performance over the last couple of years and then obviously 2021, which has been short, but very active and it tells us a lot. So remarkable performance as to the sales views since 2018. It has increased with 42% the next year and 52% last year, which definitely shows that there is a lot of interest. January and February 2021 has been short so far, but we've hit the 20 million sales views mark and have generated just over 600,000 leads. So there is interest that is quite remarkable. Sales leads, like I said, where we at with 2021, but 2019 previous year and last year, 28%. This tells us as that there's definitely interest and there are too many browsers these days for us to say that it's the agents looking around. So this tells us there's a lot of potential and the leads, the views to leads conversion illustrates that there are definitely serious buyers. Rentals are very much on trend with what we've heard before earlier today, but last year was between 2018 and 2019 at 36% interest, which is great. And 2020, there was a 7% increase to date 2021, 11 million views and just over a million leads generated. Again, illustrating activity and opportunity. So onto the next slide, which is telling us about the top 50 suburbs. So this is actually quite funny because it should have been hundreds and hundreds of suburbs. As the graph goes down, it basically stays stable from Witwerke, who's, which is the 50th suburb here on to covering most. I refer to the land of equal opportunity. If we look at the, it's very small, but what it basically says is that there is equal interest in gated security estate living suburbs that primarily consist of those estates and open residential stands. Also over all groups of all Alice in groups and price ranges. So this is where your relationship manager also comes in, in a sense that they have this information and they can assist you to get the best exposure in your suburbs of operation, as well as maybe branching out to more, but all suburbs across the board performing well. Brineston at the very top, which illustrates, well, it basically caters for, for all, whether you have 2.5 kids or families living together, or you are single and want to lock up and go. So catering for all the top 50 suburbs. Then the next slide, we refer to the median price. That is, I'm sure all of you know that, but the median price is the middle point of property prices in an area, or in a province or a nationally or whichever you want to meet measure. So it has exactly the same number and amount above the median price and below, which makes it statistically the best way to measure property prices, since it's by the outliers like averages would be. So if we look at this slide, the black line is the national median price. What is quite interesting to note is that over 2018, it was very, very much aligned with that of the national median, and it started moving further below in 2019, sorry. So what we've noticed is that from 2020, it has dived a little bit, but if you actually look at the amounts, it is very little over 100,000 grand. So proportionally, it is not that different. So again, still very good money to be made and lots of affordable properties, which obviously opens opportunities to more buyers. The rental price fairly in line with that of the national median. And as the trends are at the moment, also became slightly lower recently. But again, if you look at the actual amounts, it's less than a thousand grand difference with the province, how things median currently trending around 8,500 grand. And that is a little bit of insights backed by a lot of data that best advice would be to come in contact with your account manager, your relationship manager, and have them help you make the most of the opportunities and also give you a little bit more detail on trends and things, because it is something that we measure constantly. Thank you so much for having me. I am very relieved because we've got low trading now. And even if you go over to the generator, it creates a gap. So everything worked out fine. I hope to see everybody face to face soon alternatively on this platform. It won't be long. Thank you. Thank you, Claudia. Thank you so, so much for giving us some of those insights. And something Claudia mentioned, I just want to repeat. If you want to have a specific view of your performance, your specific performance, you're more than welcome to reach out to her. I think that brings us to the end of our session today. As you can see right next to this live button over here, you can see that the session is going to end in the next 22 minutes. Now, there are so many, this chat box here is on fire. I can't even, like it is so, let's say you asked a really awesome question. Nandipa, really, really great, great participation, but there can only be one winner. So I have decided and I've taken, I've taken my privilege as the MC. The person I feel that's co-MC'd with me today is none other than, can you guess it, Sharon Erasmus. It wasn't like more than five minutes where Sharon Erasmus didn't say something. So let's all put our hands together and congratulate Sharon Erasmus as the most engaged. And you also asked a question over here, Sharon, that got the most upvotes. Remember the other questions at the top were asked anonymously. So I can't really select those, but Sharon, I'm going to give you the most engaged. I feel like I had a co-host, yo. And then of course, special, special thank you to Andre. I also feel like you were my co-host today. You handled yourself with such, with such calm energy. I really, really appreciate that. And then the best question I'm going to have to give that to Luida Vaik, because you got us all thinking, you got us all participating in that question. So well done to Sharon, well done to Luida Vaik. It's a small little token, it's nothing big, but just a way for us to say thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Thank you. I see you saying massive pleasure there. Look, Joerg was lit. I bet none of you know that I was up until three a.m. this morning on a TikTok. I downloaded TikTok yesterday and I am really ashamed to say that, yeah, TikTok, TikTok is a problem. So before I leave, let me remind you that you are able to collect your CPD points, one and a half non-verifiable CPD points courtesy of AISA. Can somebody from my team please thank you, Studio. How quick is Studio? Studio, just put that link in there for you to access your CPD points. Please click on that link and we will get that process going for you. And Francois, the coffee is yelte malkot, the frislekot, frislekot, especially after my TikTok scenario. I really am surprised at how incredibly addictive that thing is and because I grew it means for a TikTok. Now, Kofal, guys, thank you, thank you so much. We're going to leave the platform open for a little bit longer and we're going to encourage you to connect with each other. The name of the show, the name of this event is Nexus. So connect and you can see there's a hunger for connection. There's some questions that were asked that we didn't even get a chance to get to. There's a lot of questions on how do we do it? What can we do to encourage each other? I want to thank you for taking the time out. I know we're a little bit over time, but before I go, please let me remind you that we have five flagship shows on our Facebook pages. Like yesterday, we actually had our 222nd podcast, our private property podcast, which we launched very quickly after the lockdown. We now have grown that to five flagship shows. There's the Home Shopper Show with Chad, which showcases the aesthetics of beautiful luxury homes. There's the Show House. We've now added voice over to that, but we want to kind of combine music and looking at beautiful properties to get people excited, interested in this space. There's the private property podcast that I just mentioned to you now on its 223rd episode tonight. We also have the Farmers Podcast, beautiful conversations around farming and around how we can support this industry. And then the final show, which we think is amazing, it's called the FTHB Show, the first time home buyer show, where we talk to people who have been able to realize their dream of actually owning that first property. So that's it from me. That's it from us here at Private Property. Thank you, thank you, thank you. This afternoon's Nexus is going to be on fire too. I'm going to leave the platform now, but you've got 17 minutes to move around the tables, greet each other, say hello, ask those questions, answer those questions. And the last thing I'm going to say to you is people will like people will never forget how you make them feel. They will never forget how you make them feel. And I hope today we made you feel seen, appreciated, and part of the PP family. Have a lovely day, guys. Bye.