Experienced property investors are not being scared from the market by talk of a price bubble in South Africa according to a leading educationist.

"And those who are frightened off will miss an important opportunity to build their wealth, says the CEO of YDL Anton de Leeuw. Property Armageddon is not about to strike South Africa.

"Knowledgeable investors know that property is not a single market, that it is still recovering from decades of distortion and they’ll be ready for the bubble when it eventually does come," he adds.

In fact, there would not be talk of a bubble if enough information were available, but SA statistics on the asset class are particularly bad, he notes. Poor information encourages wild hypotheses and speculation. "The public gets caught between the Scylla of developers showing them why they should be buying in overdeveloped areas and the Charybdis of financial advisers telling them to get out of perfectly good property investments."

"But even the limited statistics available tell us: don’t think bubble, think bubblette where corrections will come to certain overbuilt areas," he notes. "We have been warning our clients of overdevelopment in some fashionable areas, but even then, an investment in, say, Sandton CBD or the Cape Town Atlantic coast that is appropriately geared and structured will still be an excellent long-term investment."

And there are other sound areas where investors can get initial yields of over 10% and steady rental growth, says de Leeuw. There is no magic formula to this; it is just the particular qualities of property as an asset class.

"You can’t hand residential property investment over to someone else to do for you. You must develop the knowledge yourself. Organisations like Rode, YDL and Sapoa provide a wide range of learning opportunities to help investors make the right decisions."