JEREMY MAGGS: A warm welcome and let’s start with this. The South African Reserve Bank [Sarb] announcing that the repo and prime lending rates will again be left unchanged at 8.25% and 11.75% respectively. Rhys Dyer, chief executive officer of ooba Home Loans, says attention should now be focused on rate cuts to ensure pressure on household finances and further motivate prospective home buyers in, what he terms, a sluggish economy.
JEREMY MAGGS: But increasingly difficult for prospective home buyers, and particularly as you say, in the early stages of getting into the market, given that consumers have got to manage the increased cost of living in tandem with home repayments, that squeeze is just getting tighter and tighter, isn’t it?
RHYS DYER: It’s probably still in the early stages in the South African market, but it’s gaining a lot of momentum in the US market and we’re certainly seeing some of our banking partners adapting to bring out products to allow customers to do this. JEREMY MAGGS: And another advantage you’ll point out to me is the buy-to-let market hitting a new all-time high. Why is that?
So I think just pointing to people from all around the country seeing value in property in the Western Cape and allocating investment and funds down to that province. It’s a marked difference.‘We’re not betting the farm on the Western Cape’ – Steve BrookesJEREMY MAGGS: It’s not only value in the Western Cape, of course, because it also talks to general hesitancy in the home buying market in other parts of South Africa and attributed to social and, I guess, political uncertainty.