Carl Coetzee, BetterBond CEO
The President’s State of the Nation address is an important means of assessing where the priorities of our country’s leadership lie, particularly as it pertains to economic growth and unemployment.
Our hope for Thursday’s address is to see a clear, actionable plan for boosting investor confidence by addressing the urgent need for economic growth and sustainable measures for dealing with growing unemployment. We also need the President to communicate the ruling party’s stance on ongoing corruption, the future of debt-ridden State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), and how proposed policies around land ownership and Expropriation Without Compensation (EWC) will play out.
A healthy, growing economy is the foundation of a successful property market. The state of the residential property market offers insights into the state of consumer spending, which in turn serves as a barometer for the state of the economy. When investor confidence is up, the property market flourishes with more people buying and investing, but in order for people to be comfortable doing that they need to believe that their investment is secure and protected by favourable policies and reasonable tax measure
Herschel Jawitz, CEO of Jawitz Properties
I believe that South Africans needs to manage their expectations of what President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver in his SONA later today. The weight of expectations sits on the President to fix an economy that is essentially broken and shackled under the strain of enormous debt and institutionalised corruption. Jawitz believes that the economy may get worse before it gets better and that there is much to fix before we can even get to the starting line to drive economic growth. This in addition to the challenges he faces within his party and the unions. The economic challenges, which to a large degree are being mirrored in the residential property market, are about a crisis in confidence. To fix this, South Africans – business and consumers – need to believe that the country and the economy will get better. That is going to require a SONA that promises a little, and most importantly, delivers on those promises however few they may be.
