Paarl residential market is taking off
Paarl residential market is taking off
When a property marketing franchise which is part of a group with just over 200 such franchises is rated third in the Western Cape in that group and fifth in the group’s national rankings for March 2013, obviously something is going on there.
This was said recently by Tony Clarke, Managing Director of the Rawson Property Group. The franchise to which he was referring was the group’s Paarl operation.
“The Paarl group’s performance is especially remarkable,” said Clarke, “because Paarl is a country town in which one would not normally expect sales to be on a par with those of the highly traded, more densely populated urban suburbs.”
Lizette Joubert, the Rawson Property Group’s franchisee for Paarl, said that her ranking in the national placings bears out what she has longed claimed would be the case, i.e. that Paarl is a residential district ‘whose time has now come’.
- Lizette Joubert – Rawson Property Group’s franchisee for Paarl
“In the eight years that I have owned the franchise at Paarl,” she said, “we have never seen prices drop nor, despite now having 200 homes on our stock list, have we quite had enough stock to meet the demand and right now that is very much the situation, with the result that prices are now rising at between 5% and 7% per annum and sales are on average being achieved within 27 days in the lower and middle brackets and within 9% of the asking price, whereas previously the average was closer to 15%.”
Although there is a growing interest in top priced homes, said Joubert, most of the ‘action’ is still in the middle and lower priced brackets. 42% of her franchise’s recent/March 2013 sales this year, said Joubert, have been in the R1 million to R1,5 million bracket and 45% in the R600,000 to R1 million bracket. The remaining 13% were, however, above R2 million and Joubert believes this proportion is likely to increase from now on.
First-time homebuyers activity continues to drive the market.
To ensure that each price category is adequately served by her eight agent team, said Joubert, she has allotted them to specific areas.
“We now, therefore, have specialists serving delineated areas – and this does include the outlying, often upmarket suburbs such as Boschenmeer, Val de Vie, Pearl Valley. Furthermore, we are the agents to come and visit on Sunday afternoon’s as we hold show houses every Sunday in the area.”
Joubert added that she is quite frequently told by buyers that, much as they love Paarl and would like to live there, its prices are now too high.
“The answer to that, I have to tell them,” she said, “is that, firstly, they should consider buying slightly below the standard to which they have become accustomed because it is always worthwhile to get a foothold in Paarl, secondly, that prices are still low by comparison with our main ‘rival’, Stellenbosch & Franschoek and, thirdly, that almost any buy in Paarl will be a good one because prices here could quite easily increase significantly in the next five to six years – and there are not many South African towns of which one can say that.”
Article supplied by Rawson Paarl