December 2015 : Your Holiday Season Guide To Home Buying And Selling

“Buy land – they’ve stopped making it” (Mark Twain)

Selling or buying a house can seem like a complicated and confusing process but help is at hand! Have a look at this simple overview: “Buying or Selling a House – What You Need to Know” from the Law Society of South Africa on its website HERE

Just remember these important principles (familiar to regular LawDotNews readers) –

1. If you are the seller, you have the right to choose the conveyancer (the specialist attorney who will register change of ownership in the Deeds Office). Choose a conveyancer you can trust to act with both speed and integrity.


2. When buying into a complex, you are bound by rules and regulations imposed by either a Body Corporate if you are buying a sectional title unit or, if you are buying a separate title property in a complex managed by a Home Owners Association (“HOA”), by the HOA. Thus in a recent High Court case a homeowner in an equestrian estate was ordered to stop operating her seminar/lecture business because it breached her contractual obligation to the HOA to conform with local town planning laws. Read and understand all rules and regulations before you buy!


3. A lot can go seriously wrong with property transactions, and for many people your house is going to be your most important asset, so don’t take any chances: Agree to nothing until you have asked your lawyer for advice!

Motorists Renewing Licences - What to take with you

From 1st November, you can only register a vehicle, obtain or renew a vehicle licence or driver’s licence, or register any change in your particulars or address, if you submit proof of –

1. Your full names, date of birth and ID number, by way of “any form of acceptable identification”, and


2. Your residential and postal address, in the form of “any utility account”. If the utility account is in someone else’s name, you can lodge it together with an affidavit or affirmation from the other person declaring that you reside at that address. Anyone residing in an informal settlement can lodge “a letter with an official date stamp from the ward councillor confirming [your] postal and residential address”.

These new rules apply to all motor vehicle and driver’s licence transactions country-wide, but if you don’t have standard identification and proof of address documents, contact your own local authority for details of what it will and won’t accept.

BODY CORPORATE v NIGHTMARE NEIGHBOUR: COURT TO THE RESCUE

“His demeanour at this time was highly aggressive, flying his arms about and it was clear to me that he had to prevent himself from lashing out at me physically” (Trustee quoted in judgment below)

The irrational, aggressive and disruptive “Nightmare Next Door” owner is regrettably a well-known and much-disliked feature of all too many residential complexes. He or she makes trouble at every opportunity, attacking other owners and the body corporate’s trustees with equal abandon.

What can you do about it? In sufficiently serious cases, our courts will come to your rescue, as a recent High Court decision illustrates.

Harassment – it could be a ticket to prison …

• The owner of a sectional title unit harassed the board of trustees in his complex to such an extent that they obtained a court order prohibiting him from raising complaints, objections and the like with the trustees in any way other than through written communication to the secretary of the body corporate.


• Undeterred, he breached this order on at least 3 occasions, threatening for example to remove the trustees’ roof tiles (so that, he said, they could feel what it feels like to live in a unit with roof leaks), and aggressively objecting to the way a trustee was painting some plant pots. It couldn’t have helped his case that the female trustees on the board seem to have borne the brunt of these attacks, and to have felt physically intimidated on at least one occasion – as evidenced in the quoted evidence above.


• Holding the owner to be clearly in contempt of the original court order, the Court sentenced him to 6 months’ imprisonment. It suspended this sentence for 5 years on condition that the owner “does not harass or contact any member of the Board of Trustees personally, but must address all communication regarding complaints, grievances, proposals or commentary to the secretary of the applicant in writing”.

… and costly

Because it was the owner’s “irrational and acrimonious behaviour” that necessitated the court action, the Court also ordered him to pay the Body Corporate’s legal costs on the punitive attorney and client scale.

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