The world over, the month or two before a general election creates an air of uncertainty.

A collective fence-sitting creeps in from the property buying public as they wait to see results and make sure “worse case scenarios” do not develop.

Amazingly, when working in the UK this also happened, even when everyone knew which party would win, or, if they didn’t, there was very little between the policies of the opposing parties.

I mention this because during South Africa’s latest election, there really was uncertainty and many different permutations in terms of results and outcomes.

At the time of writing, the outcome is still not clear.

However, against that backdrop the opposite happened in terms of activity in the local property market, which was certainly a pleasant surprise and somewhat unexpected.

I can only talk about activities in my own office, of course, but in May when we were ready to hunker down, we signed the most offers in a single month since April 2021, and that was off the back of a healthy April 2024.

June has also started in a similar vein so far. Based on this, I would be inclined to say a lot of that had to do with the knowledge and skills that my team has amassed.

Even with that in mind, to have such a significant sales month before an election tells us that the market must have some solid foundations if there is that much of an appetite to buy. We can hypothesize as to why the market has been strong this time in what is normally a very flat six weeks prior to an election.

It could be a positive mindset about the country’s outlook; people are tired of reasons to hold off and are now just committing; and/or feeling now might be a good time to get into the market.

From a pure market data point of view, the latter reason would carry a lot of weight if you knew, and were tracking house price inflation – nationally and in KZN. House price inflation generally has a cyclical nature, and in KZN (as well as nationally), house price inflation has been decreasing since the end of 2021.

Economists’ graphs have been bending downwards each year and each quarter since.

The savvy people, who are looking for opportunity, are on red alert during these times. They are looking for the bottom of the cycle and want to pounce before the bottom is hit and property inflation starts creeping up again.

We may have already hit that moment. In the last two quarters of 2023 data shows that inflation was running at 1.5% and 1.2% respectively and flattening out month-on-month.

Nationally we already have the figures for Q1 of 2024 and they are indicating a slight uptick.

We only receive the provincial figures around six months later but with the deals that have started to come through in the last two months, I’d be inclined to agree with the assertion that the bottom of the curve has already been reached and the inflation growth has already begun.

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