How the residential property market is impacting middle-class families

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For many middle-class South Africans, the majority of their wealth is tied up in their physical property and retirement savings.

A stuttering economy, interest rates at multi-decade highs, load shedding, and emigration sales above their long-term average mean a struggling residential property market.The chatter around braais and dinner tables these days is being dominated by the vast destruction of middle-class wealth due to the steady collapse of the residential property market.

This is not unique to the upper-income segment of the market, although due to emigration patterns, it is certainly more apparent in the R2 million-plus price bracket. It is also the reality for R600 000 studio apartments and R1.5 million houses in ‘well-off’ areas across the country.

With primary residences, the theory has always been that nearer retirement, they’d be able to ‘bank’ the equity from their paid-off homes and downscale, with the difference being used to supplement their existing retirement savings.But if that R3 million house is no longer worth the R5 million it was expected to be, the disparity – especially for those close to retirement – could be near-catastrophic.

Both the Allan Gray Balanced Fund and the Coronation Balanced Plus Fund have outperformed inflation but underperformed the hurdle of CPI + 5% – a measure used by Coronation. The former has delivered returns of 8.3% over the last 10 years, while the latter has managed 7.9%. Annualised CPI over this period has been 5.1%. So investors would’ve kept up with inflation but hardly outperformed.Markets globally – especially in the US – have handily outperformed this.

 

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