We Still have so much to do.

MICHELLE DICKENS, the CEO of PayProp South Africa, a residential rental payment processor, writes: This Women’s Month, it’s incredible to see the impact women are making in the real estate industry on all sides of the sale or rental transaction.

By the end of July last year, according to Lightstone, women owned 57% of the total volume of properties in the market. Women also made up 66% of realtors, 61% of broker licensees and 68% of sales agent licensees.

In the residential rental sector, the numbers are even bigger. More than three quarters of the property professionals who responded to PayProp’s most recent State of the Rental Industry Survey were women.

That’s all the more remarkable when you consider that many women were denied the right to own land and property until 2021.

This month, we celebrate four powerhouse women – Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams – who led 20 000 others to demand their rightful equality in 1956. But it wasn’t until 2021, when Agnes Sithole took her fight to keep her matrimonial home to the Constitutional Court, that all women could feel secure in their homeownership rights.

Without the right to own land and property, a woman’s economic and physical security and future will always belong to those who can

How much pressure did the women take upon themselves to bring about change and progress?

They, and those who marched with them, took on the burden of changing the Constitution, perhaps without even knowing that is where their courage would lead.

But how many of us now shy away from building anything?

Women’s Month is surely worthy of ringing out a call to lay new foundations; to push forward a cause; to rise up.

There is progress to be fought for in our industry. Female representation in administration and rental management is high, and we’ve seen an increase in female ownership of properties, but there’s work to do in terms of getting equity into the hands of female business owners.

There are also differences across different types of real estate – commercial property versus residential property versus construction – and female representation in the residential sector is higher than it is in construction, for example.

As women, we are aware that we did not arrive here on our own. We can honour those who went before us by in turn advancing the horizons of freedom and building our hopes and dreams on the ever-expanding landscape of innovation, progress and equality.