PROPERTY NEWS - If you’re planning to buy a house this year, you’ll be happy to know that real estate experts predicted 2017 to be a good year for property buyers.
According to a Private Property report - 'House prices 2017: it's good news for buyers' - Lightstone Property forecasts that slow price growth of between 0.2% and 2.3% will improve the property market this year.
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan also gave first-time homebuyers some more relief when he announced that properties under R900 000 would no longer be liable for transfer duty - a tax that is charged on the value of any property that is secured - in his 2017 Budget Speech. This simply means that in the past a buyer who secured a property valued at R900 000 or less would have to pay a transfer duty of R4 500, but that no longer applies under Gordhan’s proposal.
The National Treasury has been assisting low to middle-income buyers since 2015 when it took the initiative to raise the threshold for properties not liable for transfer duties from R600 000 to R750 000, as covered in-depth by Moneyweb. Prior to this year, the last time home buyers were awarded transfer duty relief was in 2011.
Paul-Roux de Kock, Analytics Director at Lightstone, said it was not enough to only look at the property market trends because the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and interest rates also affect the market. He said it was important to look at the developments in the economy as a whole.
“Inflation in the luxury price brand is still dropping. Until we see a turnaround there, we should expect the current downward trend to continue. Good news if you’re buying,” he noted.
This is an opportune time for buying your first property. If you’re ready to buy a new home and want to calculate which price value you can afford on a new house, Private Property’s home loan calculator makes it really easy to figure out what you can afford.
Written in collaboration with Private Property.
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