Crunch time for property scheme:
http://www.citypress.co.za/SouthAfrica/News/Crunch-time-for-property-scheme-20100725

The Reserve Bank is set to decide whether it will force South Africa’s largest property syndication scheme to repay billions of rands to thousands of investors.

Financial experts feared that investors – many of them pensioners – were in danger of losing their money if the Reserve Bank cracked down.

The Reserve Bank recently found that over a period of six years, Sharemax Investments received more than R5 billion from 40 000 investors in an illegal manner. It said Sharemax operated as a bank without being registered as one.

Sharemax, the largest syndication scheme in South Africa by a long margin, has been operating for more than a decade and canvasses investments for property developments.

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Rates decision not seen to affect property market
http://www.iolproperty.co.za/roller/news/entry/rates_decision_not_seen_to

The decision to keep the repo rate unchanged at 6.5 percent was expected and should not have any impact on the residential market’s recovery, an estate agent said on Thursday.

Interest rates were at a lower enough level to provide an impetus for the market to gradually recover, Jawitz Properties said in a statement.

“What is needed more than a drop in rates, is for the banks to continue to ease their lending requirements and for consumer confidence to improve especially at the upper and luxury end of the market,” CE Herschel Jawitz said.

The lower- to middle markets, which were most interest rate sensitive, were still finding going with the banks tough.

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Banks wary of bonding self-employed people
http://www.iolproperty.co.za/roller/news/entry/banks_wary_of_bonding_self

Banks wary of bonding self-employed people

A growing number of people who are self employed, with incomes dependant on fluctuating commissions, face huge difficulties in becoming homeowners, says Lanice Steward, MD of the Cape Peninsula estate agency, Anne Porter Knight Frank.

This, she says, is because the banks, complying with the National Credit Act, have to be especially careful about lending money to people who are employed in positions which might be considered insecure.

“There is,” said Steward, “a certain arbitrariness about the concept that a self-employed person, especially one on short term contracts, is not a good security risk because many of these people are high income earners – but that is the way the banks feel obliged to act.”

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