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This interview was conducted on 5 December 2023.
JIMMY MOYAHA: It’s Tuesday, which means it’s property segment time. This time we’re doing things a little differently. We’re looking at property through the eyes of an investor and through the eyes of an author. I’m joined in studio by Zamantungwa Khumalo, who is the author of Buy Your First Home.
She’s written a lovely book on how she went about her property journey, and I thought given that we are in that festive period, this might be something nice to gift yourself, but also potentially gift others. Good evening, Zama, thanks so much for coming through to studio. How did your property journey begin?
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: It was actually an interesting journey. In many ways, it started when I was fairly young, I’ve always been surrounded by property. My mom, we grew up with her buying [SA] Home Owner magazine very religiously, and so the exposure of home was quite a big thing.
In my early years, we grew up in my grandmother’s house, like so many of us grew up, and I remember saying to my mom then, and this is something I share in the book, so I’m slightly giving it away, but I remember after an incident at school saying to her, I want her to buy us a house because I wanted to have my own bed.
Very long story short, at 22, I start working and I’m now this young professional, I’ve got a job and looking at different investment vehicles, property was one that I was interested in, and I could obviously afford to buy my own home.
I started viewing, then got intimidated, very intimidated, and I viewed quite a few properties. But you’re 22 and you’re viewing, at the time you could get a really good two bedroom for about, let’s say R400 000, R500 000 in really good areas, in the Midrand area, which is unheard of now because it’s more than double the amount.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Have you seen the interest rates?
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: Exactly, but never mind the interest rates, just the price point now is literally double that and I just felt incredibly scared and intimidated and I didn’t go ahead with the purchase.
Fast forward a couple of years later, I’m 26, I’m literally lying on a hospital bed, having yet another quarter life crisis. I really was like [one of] those people in my 20s who was a super overachiever, and if I didn’t do something big, I’d be like, oh my God, I haven’t done something big. I decided to buy myself literally properties for my birthday.
I had been viewing quite a bit and there were two I liked, and I ended up buying myself two properties for my 27th birthday and then did the same the following year and the following year. That ended up being a thing that I do. So in many ways, my property journey was something that was somewhat inevitable just because I got exposed to property at a young age.
Our home was built, so I got exposed to a house being built from the foundation up, I literally used to stand on the foundation of my bedroom at home. So I got that exposure fairly early on and had an interest in it from a very young age.
But then obviously, as I grew up, started looking at it from a very different perspective, [a] very strategic perspective. I was a first-time home buyer myself, and then of course became an investor buyer in subsequent years.
JIMMY MOYAHA: At what point do you then go from the hospital bed or from wanting to buy the property, and investing in properties in subsequent years, and that journey to deciding to write a book about it.
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: Interestingly, I started like many of us do, you sometimes just post your frustrations online. We’re talking about normal things. Now we’re in the middle of a heatwave, we’ll talk about, oh my word, it’s a heatwave or it’s the festive season. We’re talking about different things.
I used to sometimes, occasionally just tweet about frustrations around home ownership. Then, when I became a landlord, I would sometimes just very randomly tweet about it.
Sometimes when I’d learn something new, I would just randomly be like, hey, if you ever go through this, here’s a tip just because I’ve learned it. I remember there was a particular tweet that a friend of mine [Nomfundo] saw, where somebody was asking, if you’re under 30 and you’ve bought yourself a property in your 20s, do you have any tips for us who are looking to do that, and she tagged me on that post. I thought about it a bit and then I responded to it, and I did a whole thread. That thread went viral.
I remember waking up the following day, because it was in the evening, with a lot of millennials who were just as confused as I was, who also just didn’t know what they didn’t know, just as I was, who wanted to find out more. In many ways that’s when I began to be intentional about the posting. I’d already been doing property, literally [had] a property business. I was already just doing property and not talking about it on social media in a very concise, organised way. I think for me, I saw the need for us as young people to be able to have a resource that we can use.
I know for me, when I started buying, I’m the person who will literally try and find the books, be online, read the articles, watch the YouTube videos. I’ll try and find as many resources as I can. Especially because property’s such a big thing.
It’s not like buying an outfit, you can make a mistake with getting the size wrong, you can just return it and get another size. You can’t do that with property.
So you actually need to have your ducks in a row before you even sign anything.
I think the thing that propelled me, beyond my publisher literally sliding into my DMs [direct messages] and asking me, are you writing a book? I was like, no, I’m not, and they were like, would you like to write a book, we want to publish a book written by you because this is something that so many South Africans, young and old, struggle with.
There isn’t a book that as a first-time home buyer in South Africa, you [can say] I have this book. This is actually walking the first-time home buying journey with me, and there wasn’t that. I think some of the mistakes I made, had I had this book, I knew I wouldn’t have made them.
So in many ways I wrote the book I wish existed when I was navigating my first-time home buying journey.
I really hope that people who are about to embark on that journey, who are about to get a second property, because you didn’t know what you were doing the first time around, won’t make some of those mistakes because they often cost us so much money and certainly a lot of time.
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JIMMY MOYAHA: What else is in the book? So your journey, obviously through buying your property and what you’ve learned, but what else is in the book?
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: Surprisingly, my journey is a very minor part of it I think I used that to tell the story.
But fundamentally you look at how you should best prepare when you want to buy a home. So whether you are still staying at home, you’re a young professional still staying at home or you’re renting. So even when you’re renting, there are tips around if you’re looking for an apartment and you are currently a renter or you’re going to move to another apartment, this is how you would typically view an apartment when you’re a renter, versus when you’re viewing a property that you want to live in.
There are certain things you’ll concede when you’re renting because you know you’re just here for a year. But it’s a completely different story when you know you’re going to be living there probably for the next five, seven, even up to 10 years.
Looking at if you are buying, let’s say on auction, if you’re buying into a new development, if you’re looking to build, understanding your rights and responsibilities as an owner if, for instance, you’re buying into a sectional title community, a lot of us are going to be living in a lot of these sectional title communities because we’re buying apartments and we don’t know what our rights and responsibilities are when we live there.
The additional cost of home ownership. When you’re renting, you’re just paying rent, water, and electricity and that was pretty much it. Now you have to contend with other costs as a homeowner. So you really get a proper view of what you can expect at different points of your home ownership journey. Even when, for instance, you’re about to sign the offer to purchase, there’s a chapter that breaks down the offer to purchase, some of the things to look out for, some of the clauses that are very important and how signing that piece of paper is a legally binding document.
I think oftentimes people think, oh, I’m just signing it, it’s not actually legally binding. Not recognising that once you’ve signed that and you don’t meet the terms of the contract, you can be liable and effectively pay, and so many people have gone through that. So it’s really making you understand and break down the process that you’re about to embark on and just making it less intimidating.
JIMMY MOYAHA: Speaking of costs, Zama, how did you, I don’t know if you tackle it in the book around financing, of course, of the properties, and can you just share how your personal finance journey went. For someone to say at 27, I acquired two properties at the same time, is a very big statement. It doesn’t matter which financial time period you live in, whether it’s 0% interest rates or 11.75%. So how did the financing component of it play out?
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: It was very interesting, and part of me wishes I knew how to negotiate better back then because I think the interest rates in those earlier properties were definitely not that great. So one of the things that I did do was I worked with a bond originator and I talk about what a bond originator is and the benefits of working with a bond originator.
I got pre-qualified, and I remember at the time, when I think about it, sometimes not knowing things helps because knowing what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have taken the plunge and bought multiple properties, but I remember getting pre-qualified and at the time it was under a million, so it wasn’t even some big amount.
I was not earning a lot of money, it was actually a pretty decent amount and an amount that probably wouldn’t have been enough even for us to be able to buy, let’s say, a two-bed in Joburg North, and I stay in Joburg. I remember asking the bond originator, okay, so I qualify, I think it was R800 000 or something, but let’s make it R900 000.
I said, okay, I qualify for R900 000, does this mean I can only buy one property?
She said, no. Then I asked, or can I buy, let’s say two properties that are within this R900 000 because I already knew that beyond buying a place to live in, I actually already had an interest in investing in property. So I was already just thinking, is there a way to just buy two from the get-go?
She said, absolutely, as long as you don’t exceed that threshold at this moment, this is how much the bank is going to give you. Then I did that, so that’s the long story short, that’s how I got two [properties]. In terms of the financing component, absolutely, I speak about it in the book.
So even things like, in my example, you qualify for R900 000, I talk about how when you’re a first-time home buyer and you also know you don’t have a lot of wiggle room in your budget, there are so many different components to factor in when you’re buying a first home. Interest rates, obviously, is one of them, but there are so many others that a lot of us tend to not know about.
It becomes so important that if you qualify, let’s say for R900 000, qualifying for that amount doesn’t necessarily mean that you can afford it.
So perhaps it might be better to get a place that’s around R750 000, let’s say maximum R800 000, so that you don’t max out your affordability because you may not actually be able to afford to pay a bond repayment of a R900 000 bond, especially with fluctuating interest rates and the other additional costs of home ownership.
So I think the financing component, I touched on that a lot because I think that’s the one that trips us up a lot, and that’s also the one that has us regretting buying our property and feeling as though we were not adequately prepared. We didn’t understand the other costs that we needed to factor in. So that was really the part that I wanted to emphasise the most while writing the book.
JIMMY MOYAHA: And the book is available in all major outlets.
ZAMANTUNGWA KHUMALO: Yes, available at all major bookstores, Exclusive Books, Bargain Books, Reader’s Warehouse, and so on, as well as online, so Takealot or wherever you get your books.
JIMMY MOYAHA: The book is called Buy Your First Home by Zamantungwa Khumalo. I’d highly recommend anyone that is looking into the property space to consider just gazing through what the content of the book entails. I’m sure there’ll be some useful tips and advice in there. Thanks so much, Zama, for coming through. That’s Zamantungwa Khumalo, who is the author of Buy Your First Home, as well as a property investor.
