Annalien Realty Blog

Various laws and regulations need to be adhered to before documents may be sent to the Office of the Registrar of Deeds for registration, like: Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA), the Transfer Duty Act, the Value Added Tax Act, the Municipal Property Rates Act as well as the regulations regarding Home Owners Associations and Body Corporates. In addition the rules and demands of financial institutions also need to be satisfied.

In South Africa steps towards a central registration centre has been underway for quite a while already, but right now, we still have regional deeds offices: i.e. Office of Chief Registrar of Deeds in Pretoria, Bloemfontein Deeds Registry, and other Registries in: Cape Town, Kimberley, King Williams Town, Nelspruit, Mthata, Pietermaritzburg, Vryburg. This means that if you want to transfer your house in Meyerton,  you will probably be using your local transferring attorney.  He will have to send the final pile of  documents to another attorney (you might have heard them being referred to us ‘our correspondent’) close to the regions deeds office, in this case Pretoria, who will then physically hand the documents (many of them originals) in at the deeds office. There the pile of documents will go through a checking process to make sure all is in order.

If anything in the pile is not in order, the application will be rejected, the error must be corrected and the application process must start all over again. If too much time has been lost, it might mean that some of the clearance certificates have expired and new certificates will have to be applied for!