Housing cycles / ZAF

South Africa

Real residential property prices, BIS index, 1966 to 2026-Q1. The index is rebased to 2010 = 100 for South Africa alone, so its level says nothing next to another country’s. Growth and drawdown are comparable across countries; the level is not.

+2.7%

Real prices, year on year

2026-Q1; nominal +6.0%

-26.8%

Off its own real peak

peak 2007-Q3

-53.1%

Deepest real drawdown

trough 1997-Q1, within the observed sample

1966

Index starts

241 quarters to 2026-Q1

Real house price index, annual

Annual means of the quarterly real index. A year is plotted only if all four of its quarters are present, so a partial year is dropped rather than averaged over whatever is present.

Source: BIS residential property prices (selected series) Latest real quarter 2026-Q1 = 90.3; highest observed real quarter 2007-Q3 = 123.4. Methodology

Banking crises

Laeven-Valencia records no systemic banking crisis for South Africa. There is no event study on this page, and this country enters none of the cross-country medians on the index. Its deepest observed real drawdown is -53.1%, into 1997-Q1. Absence from the chronology is the chronology’s judgement, not proof that no crisis happened.

Limits of this page. The drawdown figures are conditional on the sample: South Africa’s index begins in 1966, so a peak before then is invisible and the deepest drawdown is the deepest observedone. The crisis dating is Laeven-Valencia’s, not this repo’s. Nothing here is a causal claim. See the methodology for the full list.