Women now dominate home buying in SA, says report
The gap between male and female property buyers is widening, with women buying more properties than men in every quarter in the period between January 2019 and June 2021, according to data by Lightstone Properties.
In a trend that points to the growing purchasing power of women, the volume of transactions by women surpassed those by men in 2009. The gap has widened and has accelerated in the past two years.
Lightstone is a commercial property research provider that collates data from across SA and uses specialised software to produce results used by clients across the country.
Data showed that sales to women after the hard lockdown of the second quarter of 2020 were consistently higher than in the preceding five quarters.
“On average, there has been consistent growth in the number of female property buyers when compared with the male buyers,” said Hayley Ivins-Downes, head of digital at Lightstone, in an interview with Business Day.
“While the trend line for total number of female and male buyers is increasing steadily over the period, the gap between female and male buyers is widening,” she said.
House sales by estate agents reflect the data.
Deborah Justus, head of residential sales at Renprop, said the purchasing power of women was rising.
Justus said Renprop noticed a trend of women increasingly acquiring homes and investment properties, particularly those valued under R1.5m. “Recently some of our sales have shown young female professionals buying a second property. One to live in and raise children, and [own] a second as an investment property,” she said.
Carl Coetzee, CEO of BetterBond, the mortgage originator, said women accounted for 41% of all their bond applications in 2020, a year-on-year growth of 4.5% for the 2019/2020 period.
“This suggests that more women are seeing the value of investing in property, and they’re showing greater confidence in their buying power.”
Lightstone analytics director Paul-Roux de Kock in May 2019 said that the research group’s property data analysis showed that the “number of single women buying homes rose to 71,727 in 2018, which is almost 10,000 more than the 62,032 sold to single men in the same time period”.
About 70% of Betterbond’s applicants are first-home buyers, and women will form a large portion of this segment of the market. Young black women make up about two-thirds of first-time buyers.
According to a November 2020 report by the Property Professional publication, the average profile of the typical
property investor has changed significantly in the past 10 years and is now increasingly “young, black and female”.
Another factor that may be behind an increase in woman buyers in general, is the high divorce rate in SA. Many women buyers are also looking for homes for themselves and young children following divorces, said Justus.
While there is a growing number of women purchasing property, both female and male buyers prefer to purchase property jointly.
“Female only buyers account for between 22% and 23% of all transfers by private individuals and when combined with joint male female purchases, the number rises to between 49% and 50%,” said Ivins-Downes.
Lightstone’s data also indicated that the percentage of female-only transfers was increasing, as well as that of first-time female buyers.
A total of 53% of female buyers purchased homes in the R500,000 to R1.5m price bracket during the past 12 months, with 22% buying in the R1.5m to R3m range.
As much as 19% of female buyers were buying properties valued at less than R500,000 and 6% were buying homes valued at more than R3m, according to Ivins-Downes.
Most female buyers are between 24 and 41 years old, with the next largest category being the 50 to 64 age group, followed closely by the 42 to 49year-old group.
Most female buyers opt for freehold properties, with the percentage remaining consistent at 53% from 2018 to 2021.
Sectional title has hovered at just under 30%, with living estates remaining stable at about 17%.
Gauteng is the most popular province for female buyers, followed by the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.
“It is interesting to note that despite an increase in semigration trends within SA and more people moving towards Mpumalanga and the coast, female buyers still predominantly prefer Gauteng,” said Ivins-Downes.