That certainly is not the case from my experience. I believe it’s a case of selective statistics at play here and am suspicious of the source supplier of the base data. I would not be surprised if it’s the real estate industry of one with vested interests.
It just does not gel with what i know about the SA market over the last couple of years. Many people have been very badly burned.

Then – quite suddenly – the bubble popped! somewhere during 2007, it popped…
This was caused by a severe tightening of lending standards.
Many who needed to sell their properties had to take losses of between 30 and 50% in order to get a sale. Sales literally all but dried up.

The market has been a dead horse pretty much from 2007 until now.
It has remained a buyers market.

So to say that prices rose ‘so high’ without collapsing is not really true.
Sure, for those people who have not sold their properties during the last 3 to 4 years one could say that. but for most of those who have had to sell, I dont believe they’d agree with you.

This is not the case, and it is not the case by design, and it is the main reason why there can be so much disagreement about certain asset prices. Having fundamentally different assumptions in the back of their minds, and quite often unawares, people are simply talking past each other.

For example, when the bears say that prices surely cannot rise any higher, they are probably right in terms of today’s dollars, in which they think as a means of payment and measurement. But if we think in terms of tomorrow’s dollar,say 5 or 10 years down the track, there is simply no way to know, because there is simply no telling or guessing how much excess dollars the powers that be are going to conjure into existence.

It is like estimating the time of your arrival to the North Pole, pulling a sled, simply on the basis that you are walking so many miles per day in a true northerly direction. Can you count on eventually arriving? Counterintuitive as that may be, the correct answer is that you cannot. Why? Because even as you walk, the very ice against which you measure your progress, could be shifting and floating with you in virtually any direction.

It is essentially the same with valuing things in fiat money. Unless we find an external reference point in terms of which we can define value, there is simply no way of telling how much this or that is going to cost in dollar terms, because the insiders and the cartel in charge of it mess around with its purchasing power as, and when, it suits their plans and interests. So, in dollar terms, prices could be anywhere, up or down, or both and the same.

That is a comment on fiat money versus commodity money at a general level, but the more immediate and particular implication of this new development is that trust in fiat money has now eroded to a critical point where it is starting to be rejected as a form of payment, unless that is, it is backd by gold which must be put up as collateral. Incredible stuff.

“Gold is Back as Money
Julian Phillips
(Abstract by James Turk)
In its 2010 annual report, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) said that “gold, which the bank held in connection with gold swap operations, under which the bank exchanges currencies for physical gold, stands at 8,160.1 million in special drawing rights, equivalent to 346 tonnes this year, up from nil in 2009.” Apparently the amount has climbed to 382 tonnes since the report was issued. This is the best news gold has had in 30 years, writes Phillips. He discusses what swaps are and who does them; the significance of the transactions; and why this means that gold is back and alive in the monetary system. In short, it seems that a country (or countries) needed foreign exchange to counter some shortfall in its accounts and raised these funds as a short-term liquidity measure, believing it would be able to return the currency and receive its gold back. The gold would then be returned at the conclusion of the swap period in return for the currencies swapped. If it failed to return these funds to the BIS, then the BIS could discreetly place the gold with another central bank, should it not want to keep the gold. If it did so, the BIS would simply report its disposal of the gold, the originating central bank would report the drop in its gold reserves and the gold buying bank would report its increase in the reserves. This puts the transaction into an entirely different category. It seems that the credit of one or more of the world’s central banks is not good enough for other governmental institutions. If word got out as to which this country is, then the financial markets would go into a tailspin, shaking the global financial system to its core. No wonder the BIS is keeping a low profile.”

http://financialsense.com/contributors/julian-phillips/gold-is-back-as-money