SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Hayley Ivins Downes, head of digital at Lightstone Property. They put out some great property reports on a fairly regular basis. Hayley, I appreciate the time this morning. I suppose the first question to kick off with is will we be seeing increases in property prices, sort of overall residential property, during 2021?
HAYLEY IVINS DOWNES: It is real. And when we kind of break down into the property types, the biggest portion is actually on the freehold, which is your standalone houses. That’s at 18%. Estates are at 9%, sectional title 5%. So it’s really interesting. People are looking at a bigger property, possibly working from home. Yeah, it’s really interesting.
SIMON BROWN: Price points – early in the pandemic we saw, I suppose, sort of mid–2020 a lot of activity in lower costs, sort of the affordable housing space, [with] interest rates at generational lows. Has that trend continued or we starting to see more activity up the cost curve? HAYLEY IVINS DOWNES: Yes, absolutely. Those numbers are back up to what they were in 2018. We are looking at kind of the back end of 2020, quarter three/quarter four of 2020, [which] was really high. We had about 64 000 transactions in a quarter – and compared to 2018, 61 000. Now we are looking at about 55 000. So definitely the numbers are back up there.