 private property family. Excuse me. Good evening. It's seven p.m. and time for another insightful conversation on all things property. My name is Martha Shinga and I'm your guest host for the evening. And welcome to all our viewers who are joining us for the very first time. Welcome. Of course, special greetings to our loyal friends, our day ones and the friends we've made along the way. Come on in. You are right on time. We see you all from YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. And we're so glad that you could join us once again this evening. It's our month, it's still our month ladies. So happy women's month once again. Remember that this is only one of four great shows that private property brings you to help you make informed decisions about your property investment. You can catch our other great shows every weekday at eight o'clock. We start off with Chad on Mondays and Fridays for the home buyers show where he showcases some of the best properties that are in the market on www private property.co.za. Tuesdays and Thursdays are with Mali on the farming podcast and in the middle that's Wednesdays we have Esther on the first time home buyers show to motivate you to chase those property goals. Now I don't know about you but our latest competition has gotten me so excited. We are getting closer to one million followers. So please don't stop. It's a whole lot of fun and you can get everyone in your circle involved. Simply comment on our post, give us a review, share our Facebook page and podcast links and remember to tag your friends and family. Now the cash prize is rolled over in the last few days and later in the show we will reveal this evening's winner of the 2000 grand cash prize. Don't forget that you can only claim the prize if you are with us during this show. So will it be a roll over or will someone take it this evening? We will find out a bit later and as you do so remember the three hashtags that you use for the post to count and they are hashtag one million followers, hashtag ten thousand comments, hashtag five thousand shares. Now let's not keep our guests waiting any longer. This evening we are looking at things we should consider before renovating our homes or rental properties. I am joined by Namkele Goumede Majola, the financial and business manager at Isandla Property Fund. Happy Women's Month in Namkele and welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Happy Women's Month. Thank you so very much. Now before we start with our talk before the evening I was reading up on your company, Elia, and I was quite impressed about the work that you do on Women Empowerment. Do you mind to share with our viewers what you do at Isandla Property Fund? Sure. So Isandla Property Fund is an unlisted property company. We are majority black female and managed. So our CEO is a black female, she's a powerhouse and then I am the financial manager. Our black female ownership comes from our broad-based empowerment trust called the Entrepreneurship Development Trust and their beneficiaries are largely women like above 90 percent of their beneficiaries are women and that's where our black ownership comes in and then our minority shareholder is invested property. Wow, women power right there. I think that's the part that really just got me so excited and I think really ladies there are the opportunities. We are making a mark in property so that really got me so excited. Now let's get on to the topic of the evening. Renovating a property can be an exciting project for various reasons that people do it it could be for vanity some do it for you know for some it's for major projects for flipping or student accommodation like if you are like one of the top friend gang members and my friends say me and I hope he is taking notes this evening but it really can also be daunting. I mean personally that is not something that I'm even looking forward to it's I'm not even thinking about renovations it just sounds so intimidating. Maybe let's first look at some of the main renovation projects that property owners generally do. Sure well I think you've mentioned quite a few of them you could just wake up one day and think oh especially now in lockdown when we're spending more time in our homes you could be thinking oh I really want to have a different kind of kitchen or I really want to create this kind of space for myself so there's definitely from a home perspective and those kinds of renovations there's also from an investment property perspective perhaps you're thinking if I changed my investment property and made it more modern and made it more urban then I could get higher rentals for that and so that's something you could be considering or like you said it's a massive project like you buy a house on the cheap in a good neighborhood and you decide if I modernize this and put some money in I could sell it for a lot more and make a bit of a profit there so there's some big big projects that you could do there as well. It sounds like a whole project plan and I'm just thinking now before one things of breaking down the walls you know I think some of us can you know start thinking that tomorrow I'm getting the hammer you know start breaking the walls but where do we start? So yeah first of all please don't break down your walls anything structural could be an issue for you so I think in terms of just where you start you just need to decide who are you renovating for so are you renovating for yourself are you renovating for future tenants are you renovating for future buyers if you're renovating for yourself i.e. you've been a lockdown you're tired of your space you want to give it a bit of a lift that's fine but you do need to consider okay first of all what project do you want to do and secondly how much capital is that going to take and is that going to add value to your home because the last thing you want to do is to have a one and a half million round home for example and then you put in another 500 000 round but you can't get that out of the market when you sell it like no one's going to buy that back from you so you very carefully need to consider how much are you putting in to make sure that you don't over capitalise your home and not get a return back on that and then that's similarly when you're thinking of a rental property if you're thinking oh you know we just got a notification now that it we could be load shed between six and nine so you think to yourself if i put in some kind of inverter or some kind of battery into my rental home i could get more tenants something like that seems to me that you could command a higher rental in the tenant market because that's something that not a lot of rental properties have so you just need to consider what you're looking to do very carefully and make sure that you can make a return off of it unless of course this is your forever home and you aren't planning on selling in which case you can do whatever you want great so i think we we are now getting to the point about talking about what renovations add value to your property and what doesn't and like you were saying you must you must think whether you are doing it for you because if you want to spend a little bit more on something that might not do anything to the value of your property but you are happy to live with it because that is your home where you're planning to spend a lifetime that is something quite doable you've also mentioned a few things that you know you could do for your rental property is there are there any other things that one could do to to increase the value of their property i think it depends on a lot of things it depends where your rental property is kind of based i think initially people would think i should perhaps modernize the space i think that would always allow you to command a higher rental um but it is really dependent on where your property is based and and what your market in your property is looking looking for so for example if your market is a young professional they might not mind that this space is a bit smaller but looks a lot nicer whereas on the on the flip side if your market is a young family or perhaps an older family um perhaps they don't really mind that the space doesn't look as modern as long as there is more space so it just depends what you're looking out for and who your market is so you really need to know your market um i i like what you're saying about location because that is the one thing that we're always um learning here in this podcast that location is quite key because you also don't want to go and spend a lot of money in a in a location that will necessarily not attract the you know the kind of uh a client that you are actually looking for absolutely and and you also just need to check that you can actually get a higher rental in that market so you definitely need to do your market research because even if you put in an extra 50 thousand or 100 thousand in your property but your rentals already at the kind of cap in that location it'll be very hard for you to get that money back from a tenant and i think that's very very important that whole concept of over capitalizing again i think it comes in a play now non-clear this is quite interesting but we now need to pause for a moment please if you would allow us our viewers are dying to know who is working away with the cash prize from our competition as i have mentioned that we are getting to the one million followers on the private property uh uh podcast as well as the the facebook page so now uh the random picker will select the winner and it should be on our screens right now so who is taking that 3000 rents this evening i cannot wait to see that and the winner of the 2000 cash prize from our competition it's zin clay zamin congratulations zin clay you are our third winner of this competition well done uh do show yourself on the comment section so that the team can confirm your win enjoy the prize enjoy it enjoy it now getting back to our conversation uh non-claim so as land ladies and i think we've spoken a little bit about this um uh elia um so as land ladies and landlords what are the home improvements that we should be doing in our rental properties so i think um elia on when we're when we're chatting um offstage we i was saying that last night i was watching estee who or who is the host of our first time home buyers show and her guest you know she was talking about how she is renovating some of her properties that are based in a township because she has realized that people want to remain in the township but they want what is happening in the urban areas you know the nicer townhouses and all of it so she started investing towards them so she has found that market for herself and she's just running with it so can can you talk to us a little bit more about it as well as what can we do as you know property owners um to our our rental uh our units yeah so i think similarly as i mentioned before um it really does depend on what are you looking to do so the lady in your podcast from yesterday she's really found a great market for herself because if you speak to people you do find that people love the township community they love the vibe they don't actually mind the drive say they work in i mean the cbd sat and cbd or whatever they don't mind the drive going out there because their families are there they love the vibe there and so they're happy to stay there but the places for them to stay they prefer that they look similar to how they would and let's say the northern suburbs and so she's picked a really great niche for herself in that sense um again i think it's very similar in the sense that if you have a modern apartment you're likely to get um more interest especially if your market is younger so if you if you have a small apartment i miss you like a lot of us start out with small apartments because they're also cheaper um on the cost scale and often our our tenants that we're looking up for our market is young professionals or young families and young people so millennials um they love kind of modern urban spaces and so if you renovate your spaces to look more modern um you know a kitchen does like a lot to a space similarly a bathroom those are the first two things that i look at when i look at a property and so i think of those two spaces of yours are um modern and look really good then you are proper positioning yourself in that market that you're in but you do just need to consider who am i renovating for is it for the tenants and then you also just need to consider all the things that come with that so the budget the timeline the project management all those gray hair inducing things speaking of gray hairs i think we must talk about this um i mean renovation is it's a project on its own and there are those people who think they're quite brave i know like semi one of the one of the of our followers that i was talking about because it does quite a lot of renovations and i know he does some of them himself i think he's brave so and for me like once again it's something that i wouldn't attempt to do so do you want to talk to me about um the pros and cons of getting a project manager versus doing it yourself it depends on the project firstly so if for example you are just renovating your kitchen that's certainly something that you could take on yourself um you do have to understand that it is a project and you will probably get more gray hairs when the project is over than you started with um but if it's a smaller project and you know that that's a skill of yours like you can manage people and you're very good with timelines and deadlines and budgets things like that then that's certainly something that you can take on yourself if you know that that is not your strength then maybe outsource it i'm not saying to a project manager but you can maybe outsource it to a family member who has that strength because i think a project manager adds a lot of value when it's a kind of larger project but if i'm not sure the value that you'll get for what you're paying if it's just a smaller project like like your kitchen so i'd say if it's a kitchen if it's a bathroom and you know that you're not good at that kind of stuff then try and outsource it to a friend or a family member who is really good at that kind of stuff if it's a bigger project i would definitely say um get a project manager because managing a renovation or a flipping a home is like a full-time job so if you have a full-time job things are definitely going to fall through the cracks so um if you're managing a bigger project i would definitely say outsource it it is going to cost you more than you would have spent if you did it yourself but in actual fact sometimes what people find is that if they weigh up the time lags that they experience by doing it themselves and the increase in costs by doing it themselves sometimes it almost balances out and they should have just gotten the project manager in the first place yeah sometimes so speaking about the budgets and uh you know some of the people that we talk about we talk to uh around renovations they tell you that you know they would have started with a certain amount you know uh in mind they would have learned to spend 100,000 rents and a month later or two months later everything has just escalated how do you how do you keep your budget you know in control how do you manage your budget yeah so the budgeting piece is really important and and you have to be really detailed about what you're looking to do so you you almost have to know to the number of tiles how many am i going to need you need to know what tile it is so you know how much it's going to cost you you need to be really detailed about your budget so that you know whether what you want can work within your budget or not and even after you've been really detailed you still need to add a little bit of a buffer in there in case things go wrong in case time lags happen and you have to pay people more because they're staying for longer um so you i definitely say you need a 10 to 20 buffer on your already very detailed budget just in case things go wrong because the worst thing is if you're 80 through your project and now you've run out of money and now you have an 80 done kitchen that's the worst so um definitely have a contingency in your budget of 10 to 20 percent to be safe so planning is very important you must know what you want out of it you must know how much you want to spend on it and just build in that 10 20 percent contingency now not everyone of us you know are into rental owning rental properties some are just you know home owners you know they just have their residential property what would you say that's you know for as a smaller project but as some of those not so major renovations that one can do but they make a whole lot of difference to your property so i think definitely keeping a kind of garden area that's i won't say landscape because that sounds very serious but just a pretty looking outside area for the family to sit or for you to sit but you know from a home owner perspective that kind of stuff is very personal to you um to your family to what you guys do in your home and to how you want to use your home some families are big entertainers and so they love to have entertainment areas bright areas a bar etc some families really aren't like that they'd rather spend more money on an office or a study with large bookcase and lots of books so for a home perspective it is really difficult to say what parts you should renovate and what parts you shouldn't especially because you don't know who your buyer is going to be so you could be the entertainment household and your buyer is the office slash study household and so they will make the home into their own anyway so that kind of stuff is really really personal um but you should definitely go for it making sure that you do not over capitalise that is the key point of this podcast today no it didn't say i think we hear it all the time do not over capitalise here and i'm sure even on the comment section uh unfortunately this evening i'm not able to see that that i'm sure either that that's that's one of the things that are that are coming through so now as we begin to to actually wrap up um our discussion um renovations don't come cheap right you could be spending anything between a few thousand brains to 100 thousand brains as you've said as we've said earlier it also depends on the kind of project that you are you you are busy with so in terms of financing how do we prepare for for for a project like this and are there any financing options that are available out there for home renovations sure so i mean getting a home renovation project through a bank is really difficult i'm not saying they don't do it um but it is quite difficult for them to back that a lot of it depends on what the value of your home they have on their side so what is the value of your home on their side and so if you include this will it add value to your home or not in their books um so i mean you can certainly test the idea with all the banks not just your bank you can go to all of them but i do think that someone with a renovation plan in mind should definitely be looking at it as a short to medium term savings goal because banks aren't really on the side of offering that up as an option as a dead option and if they do i really don't think it would be at a hundred percent so either way you would need to put some of your equity and some of your money in there so if this is a project that you're thinking about um it's certainly a short to medium term goal dependent on how big the project is well that's a bit of a bummer but yeah i think uh i think what's what's quite important is that you need to save for it and you need to plan properly so if you are thinking about getting into a project a renovations project um now is the time to save up for it non-play it's been absolutely awesome thank you so much for sharing your insights we truly truly appreciate it and i enjoyed the conversation thank you so much for joining us that's such a pleasure thanks for having me thank you and then also non-play uh commit the margola of is on the property fund you can get in touch with them on the details uh that we provided on the podcast information i believe we do not have a winner for this evening so it looks like we are rolling over the price so tomorrow 2500 grand will be up for grabs so continue to comment post on our facebook pages share the page um give us a review tag everybody so guys it's really been awesome as always thank you for tuning in i really enjoyed my time with you this evening zama will be back tomorrow evening so same time on all of our platforms so let's head over to the farming podcast with mbali she will be on at 8 p.m until next time stay home and be safe michael sega good night