Location is key when purchasing property. Find out from Simon Bray how to make sure that your home is located in the right neighbourhood for your lifestyle.
Presenter: A very good morning to you. It's a Tuesday morning. Welcome to your feel-good breakfast show, live on SABC 3. Now in the later series of our private property first-time home buyers series, we talk about doing the proper research to ensure that your dream property is in the right kind of location and neighborhood to suit your lifestyle and your needs. And Zoe has more.
Starting your online property search is a lot of fun. Having all of the options in front of you with beautiful pictures, all of the details laid out and you having to decide which one you would like to purchase. Also, taking into consideration your financial status. Of course, a very important aspect is also to ensure that your home is located in the right neighborhood for your lifestyle. So today, we have Simon Bray in studio to tell us more about approaching this task. You know what?
We've spoken about this before - location, location, location - but how can a neighborhood make or break your dream home?
Simon Bray: Well, I think location is the key thing when it comes to purchasing property. You want to buy a new car. You look on the car website. You find the one you want, and you can bring it to wherever you are. With property, it's all about picking exactly where you want to live. And that's got all sorts of ramifications around what lifestyle you're looking for, what financial return you're looking for from the property in years to come, and what your budget is today. So it's really an important decision to choose the right neighborhood for your particular needs. How do you find that balance based on not only your financial budget or your financial capacity but also your lifestyle? How do you find the right neighbourhood then?
Simon Bray: When people start their property process, there's a dream, there's an idea of what they want. And websites like ours really help the buyer understand the different nuances in the neighbourhood, the different features they can come to expect from property there. Instead of just letting the consumer run around the website and hope to find what he's looking for, we try to package it neatly on the site with these beautiful neighbourhood pages. They've got a map of what the neighbourhood's all about. They've got some price detail and data around what the prices have been doing in the neighbourhood over the past few years. So is it a good financial investment or not? So it's very helpful, a very useful little page that you can go to and understand everything about that particular neighbourhood.
Now you mentioned this is a financial investment, buying your property. Now also you need to keep in mind, choosing your neighbourhood.
What factors do you need to look out for to make sure that this the right neighborhood to settle in so that in future your investment grows?
Simon Bray: Well, isn't this the great thing about property? The idea is that you invest in a property today, and you see it grow over a period of time. Not a lot of assets that we invest in tend to grow as fast as property does. And South Africa's a fascinating property economy. You've got parts of the market that move really slowly, and you've got parts that move really, really quickly. And so there's this opportunity when you're investing to pick the right neighbourhood and see that growth outpace inflation, and that's really the key. So understanding what has happened in a neighbourhood before, what new changes may be coming into a suburb or into a neighbourhood that might accelerate growth in the future, all of that is critically important. And that's where private property can really help. It can make you an expert in that particular neighbourhood, that particular suburb, to the point that you understand whether it's going to do better or worse than the suburbs next to it.
Well, Simon, thank you so much for all of that information. And it just shows that research really is the most important thing when it comes to finding the right neighbourhood for you, for your budget, and of course, for your lifestyle. Now there is the perfect neighbourhood for you out there. All you have to do is log onto www.privateproperty.co.za and explore all of the beautiful areas in our country.
Whether it's your first apartment in the city, a trendy suburban townhouse, or that dream family home on a gulf estate, there's a home for everyone on Private Property.
