Semi-gration trends in South Africa (The Bugle)

People vote with their feet. When it comes to investigating the competitiveness of regional economies within South Africa it is useful to look at residential property transactions and the reasons why people buy and sell. By measuring the level of emigration-related selling (people leaving South Africa) and the “semi-gration” related selling (people selling in one region so as to move to another within South Africa) we can get a clear sense of which regional economies are able to attract the most skilled people and thereby make them the most economically competitive. 

FNB have done this statistical exercise using deeds office data and restricting the transactions analyzed to those people who have sold in one region and bought in another within 12 months of the transaction. This provides a quantifiable proxy for semi-gration activity within the country. The survey focuses on the major metro regions with the Ethekweni municipal boundary being the proxy for KZN. As the Dolphin Coast is largely within the Kwadukuza municipal area, the current wave of buying within our region is excluded from the figures. The emigration selling rates recorded indicated 5% of all selling within Ethekweni, the highest across the regions, and 2.3% for Pretoria, the lowest, 2.7% for Cape Town and 4.7% for Johannesburg. Emigration related selling is significantly down from a few years ago. The number of sellers in each region selling in order to relocated to elsewhere within South Africa says much about the region’s ability to provide career opportunities or a perceived lifestyle. The total Gauteng average is 8.5% of all sellers, with Ethekweni a similar 8.7%. Cape Town is however significantly lower at 5.7% indicating a far lower rate of selling in order to re-locate elsewhere from the Western Cape. 

The level of foreign buying as a percentage of all buying by region provides further insight into the confidence foreign buyers have within a region. Cape Town wins this race with 5%, while Johannesburg comes in next with 3.5%, followed by Pretoria (3.2%) and Ethekweni (3.2%). For the majority of sellers relocating within South Africa, the reason is for work purposes. For KZN 69% of those sellers re-locating were doing this for work purposes. However, for Gauteng the same figure is only 48% indicating the economic competitiveness of Gauteng and that people moving away from Gauteng would typically be doing this for lifestyle reasons. The semi-gration destinations by major provinces show that those people from Gauteng are choosing the Western Cape (36.3%) firstly as their preferred relocation destination, followed by KZN (21.1%) and Northwest province (11%). For those relocating from KZN the choice of destination is overwhelmingly Gauteng (56.7%), followed by the Western Cape (24%). For those who actually do leave the Western Cape, Gauteng (53.2%) is the main choice.