2020 won’t be forgotten anytime soon. Individuals, households, businesses and whole industries had to adapt to the threat of COVID-19 and deal with unprecedented uncertainty.
As always, the PayProp Rental Index provides an indelible record of events, tracking the impact of the virus on the residential rental market in detail. Next, we zoom in on three South African rental agencies to get the stories behind the stats. Business leaders at Century 21, Rose Eedes Properties and Realty Atlas explain how they guided their agencies through 2020 and how PropTech has helped them cut back on admin while delivering a better service.
In 2020, we saw the slowest year-on-year rental growth at national level since the start of the Index 12 years ago – and in November, our first ever month of negative year-on-year growth. As usual, we also examine rental trends by province, and look into how tenant behaviour has changed over the last 12 months.
Finally, we hand over to our South African banking partner, Absa, for a special feature on consumer confidence in the property market. The Absa Homeowner Sentiment Index tracks how positive South Africans feel about buying, selling and investing in homes – and finds some surprising results.
I hope you enjoy this annual edition of the PayProp Rental Index. We’ll return with the next issue next quarter – hopefully with news of a recovering market.
