Have a look at this little bit of excellence:

So if you peer real close (or you click on the infographic and enlarge it), you’ll notice South Africa in the red. Unusually, the “red” indicates that South Africa is (on average) one of the places where home ownership is most affordable: where average monthly mortgage payments are about 37.17% of average monthly income.

As opposed to, say, Hong Kong, where the ratio is 239.94%. Or Ghana, where the ratio is closer to 737.47% (although I suspect that has a lot to do with Ghana having a very low average income, and only a few isolated mortgages available only to the wealthy).

Don’t pay too much attention to the rental index. I got all excited, because I thought that it was also just the average monthly rental payments as a percentage of average monthly income – and then I could say something about the relationship between the two indices. Then I realised that it’s just the cost of renting an apartment in the country’s big cities as a percentage of rental costs in New York City – so it’s nearly 7 times more expensive to live in New York than it is to live in Joburg – but that’s not really news.

Happy Friday though.

Rolling Alpha posts about finance, economics, and sometimes stuff that is only quite loosely related. Follow me on Twitter @RollingAlpha, or like my page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rollingalpha. Or both.