Leveraging the housing asset through trade

The next Faces of the City seminar will be presented by Kecia Rust from the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa.

A fundamental principle of the housing asset is the ability to use it for trade - homeowners buy and sell property, investing their income and realizing equity while they address their changing housing needs over time. In this way, housing is much more than simply shelter. It is also a critical component of household wealth, and a focus of most households’ savings. South Africa has a vibrant residential property market, which in the past 23 years has developed to serve a growing proportion of our population. Although affordable properties comprise a substantial proportion of the residential property market, the incidence of informal sales, or the backlog in the transfer of government subsidized stock has meant that in some cases, the integrity of the title deed may have been compromised. While the extent of informal market transactions is, by nature, difficult to estimate, they are thought to be significant. The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa is in the process of setting up a Transaction Support Centre to facilitate the resale of houses in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Rust will present on some of the transaction stories emerging from the establishment of the centre and some of the strategies used to address backlogs in the transaction process.

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