Rates went up. The market shrugged. Here is the number that matters.

The July BetterBond Property Brief landed this week, and one sequence of numbers tells you where this market is going.

In May, the Reserve Bank nudged prime from 10.25% to 10.5%. Home loan applications duly dipped 1.6% year on year. And yet: applications are still 5.7% higher than two years ago, and average purchase prices just set new record highs, R1.7 million nationally, up 8.4% and comfortably ahead of inflation. First-time buyers paid 9% more than a year ago.

Read that again. Rates went up, and prices set records anyway. That is not what a fragile market does.

Two forces explain it. First, the banks have quietly eased deposit requirements even as borrowing costs rose, which puts buying power back into the market through the side door. Second, the economy is helping rather than hurting: GDP growth of 1.4%, fuel prices down, and a rand 8% stronger against the dollar than a year ago. BetterBond’s economist, Dr Roelof Botha, points out that between 2023 and 2025, when rates peaked, house prices grew just 1.5% a year, negative in real terms. Since rates began easing, growth has run well ahead of inflation. The direction of travel is set.

Here is the line in the brief that matters most for anyone weighing a purchase in the northern suburbs: this remains a buyers’ market, and it is unlikely to remain one once prime drops into single digits.

That is the window, spelled out by the bond originators themselves. Buy while the market still negotiates, with a bank that wants your deposit to be smaller, before the rate cuts arrive and bring the queue with them. In our world that logic is amplified: new developments priced today carry no transfer duty, and the difference between buying before and after a rate-cutting cycle is measured in hundreds of thousands of rand at northern-suburbs prices.

If the numbers are the obstacle, test them properly: a pre-approval through our bond partners takes minutes and costs nothing, and it tells you exactly what the window looks like for you.