South Africa: Understanding Housing Markets - Using Municipal Data

In 2015, CAHF was commissioned by the City Support Programme of the National Treasury of South Africa, and the World Bank, to support better local decision-making through more effective use of metropolitan municipal property datasets. The task focused on how to best capture, agglomerate, categorise and analyse municipal property data so as to describe and assess a residential property market. Three metropolitan municipalities were selected for this investigation: Cape Town, eThekwini and Mangaung. The work involved three components:
• An outline and conception of a housing market framework as a tool for understanding the overall housing continuum in South African metropolitan areas.
• The development of a housing data system (including data, tools and expertise) for cities to actively use to further their immediate and longer-term housing goals.
• The piloting of a House Price Index (HPI) to clarify the character and growth of local housing markets.

This document, published in January 2018, describes the entire project, and sets out the lessons learned. Its primary audiences are local municipal and national officials seeking ways to support metro municipality functions such as planning, fiscal management, human settlements oversight, and impact measurement.

CAHF’s work in South Africa is supported by: