Deeds Office chaos causes gridlock in Cape Town property transfers

The Cape Town Deeds Office was closed for four working days from last Tuesday, 28 July, apparently for Covid-19 decontamination – this follows on highly intermittent operations since it reopened under lockdown Level 3 in May. 

At present, the deeds office’s turnaround time from date of lodgement to when files are available for registration is two months. The bottleneck is causing the city’s property sector to gridlock as transactions grind to a halt, with a backlog running into tens of thousands of deeds. 

According to the deeds office’s website, turnaround ought to be seven working days. 

Industry insiders blame poor management, saying deeds office management and staff are using Covid-19 as an excuse to not go to work. 

Meanwhile, property sector representatives have lodged an urgent application at the Western Cape High Court to see business restored and the backlog addressed.

This week, at 90 Plein Street, adjacent to Parliament, conveyance attorneys queued in the rain for hours, waiting to enter the deeds office building. Inside, corridors were crammed with more conveyance attorneys wearing masks, as they queued to access different parts of the premises. 

In addition, about 50 deeds office clerks have been banned from the building. Some of these clerks set up a table on the opposite pavement in Plein Street, compiling documents for transactions worth millions of rand in the wind and rain. 

Giles Buswell of Henwoods Attorneys, a conveyancer for the past 30 years, described the situation as ludicrous.  

“Before Covid,” says Buswell, “you could expect lodgement to take two weeks. Now it’s two months. I mean, transactions I lodged at the end of June, are still not registered yet. It looks to me like they may be registered at the end of August.” 

How does this affect the pockets of property buyers and sellers?  

“Let me give you an example,” says Buswell. “Let’s say the seller expected transfer to register in April. But for April and May, completely nothing happened at the deeds office. So it only got lodged in June. From here, it takes another two months. So now, this seller, who anticipated his or her money in April, will only have it in August. So now they need to borrow that money somewhere. What if they were buying a new house? Who knows what problems people are facing.” 

This week, Buswell waited in Plein Street outside the Cape Town Deeds Office, in the rain.

“Only five metres of that queue was sheltered, for the rest people were in the cold,” he says. “So there I was in the rain, watching. Let me explain about the plight of the deeds office clerks. Virtually all conveyancers employ at least one such clerk. The clerks are an interesting community and have by all accounts been a feature at the deeds office for generations. They are highly responsible and dependable people and are often the senior breadwinner in their family, raising children and supporting elders. They are not official deeds office staff. They are independent contractors; we pay them. So these are the people who get the legwork done, they perform highly specialised tasks. They make the deeds office work.

“Now, with Covid, these guys have been banned from the building. Only conveyancers are allowed inside. So some clerks set up a table in Plein Street on the sidewalk across the road from the deeds office. Here about 20 of them were putting together documents for transactions worth millions and millions of rands, in the rain and the wind. I just thought to myself: ‘This is utterly absurd.’ That the deeds office cannot create a system whereby these guys can get into the building, out of the rain, to do their work with dignity. It’s ludicrous. I’ve been a conveyancer for 30 years, and they’ve always been inside the building. A lot of these guys have lost their jobs, because they cannot get into the building. Before, there used to be about 50 of them.” 

Attorney Stefan le Roux, former president of the Cape Town Attorneys Association, tells Maverick Citizen: 

“It appears that the Cape Town Deeds Office is blaming Covid for being behind, for their backlog. In fact, it is poor management and just not keeping up with the latest legislation on how to manage Covid in the workplace. They opened again on Monday – but for how long? The queues are ridiculous, attorneys are queuing for hours.” 

Le Roux added that, to his knowledge, the deeds offices in Johannesburg and Pretoria are operating with a normal turnaround time. 

In an emailed response to questions from Maverick Citizen, Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development spokesperson Reggie Ngcobo refutes allegations of poor management. 

“The department refutes this allegation and is working very hard with its stakeholders to ensure that we provide a world-class and secure deeds registration system,” Ngcobo writes. “Stakeholders are more than welcome to engage the department if they have any concerns.” 

Court documents note that the deeds office was initially supposed to reopen on May 1. Due to problems, including with PPE (personal protective equipment), it only reopened on May 13.