SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with John Loos. He is property sector strategist at FNB Commercial Property Finance. John, appreciate the early morning. We’ve had your second quarter 2024 Property Sales Activity Survey. Interesting. This is owner service, so there is a bit of developer or investor in it, but you’re focusing on owner service, and you’re very much focusing on the buying and selling, not the rental space, as I understand this survey.
What we saw from brokers when doing a simple business confidence survey, asking the question, ‘Are you satisfied with business conditions or not?’ Only 30% at that stage said that they were satisfied with business conditions, down from 35% in the previous quarter. JOHN LOOS: Well, it didn’t. I think load shedding is one thing for property investors and property owners. The other thing is operating costs. So yes, the lights have been on more, and hopefully that bring a positive impact to economic growth and demand for commercial property.
SIMON BROWN: I take your point. We knew about the ruling party under 50%. We just didn’t know what that meant – well, now we do – but we had to wait for that to play out. The office market has some longer-term challenges to work through. We know we’ve moved to a more hybrid working model with a lot more hot-desking and hotelling, which saves on office space needed. So a lot of companies have been adjusting in terms of their office-space requirements. A lot of that has to be repurposed into often residential, and the office market sort of has to shrink in size relative to the overall property stock. So it has longer-term issues to deal with.