Daan's Snippets

Practice News

  • RAF;
    • The RAF leadership appears, deservedly, to be in trouble – it is accused of deliberately withholding information from Scopa – and reports have it that only two law firms received 84% of the RAF legal services spend last year.
    • The special leave that the RAF CEO was placed on, after he refused to attend a Scopa meeting, was revoked by its Board and replaced with suspension.
    • In the background is an SIU probe into an RAF lease worth R79m.

If the above prove true, then our Minister of Transport should be asked why she had waited this long to take steps against a CEO who had been publicly reviled for some time.

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Hard news

Conveyancing/property

eDRS: last week the Chief Registrar of Deeds ran training sessions throughout South Africa for those conveyancers who volunteered to form part of a pilot group. Of interest may be the following:

  • Rwanda has been operating such a system for 10 years!
  • The system is technically easy to use but requires understanding of the current forms and practice.
  • The intent is that the system will eventually link SARS, municipal rates systems, Home Affairs, CIPS, the SG, the Master and our High Courts.
  • A note that emerged in passing is that AI has enabled the unscrupulous to generate bogus court orders and we should be wary in this respect.
  • Conveyancers will have to keep the originals of, for instance, powers of attorney, for seven years.
  • It will probably take some five years before this system to be fully implemented. In the interim, for now, pilot practitioners will lodge both manually and electronically.
  • What will be nice about the system is that it would have a single portal to search the deeds office database, view documents, apply for documents and so on.
  • Expect to pay lodging costs (R50 or whatever it is then) upfront out of business. Frankly, I can’t see this nonsense being perpetuated – one expects a full bill on registration or final withdrawal; and add-on is expensive and time consuming to run.
  • The log in link is as follows, as the others do not work seamlessly: https://uat2.eservices.gov.za/eDRS/#/auth/login
  • Criticisms:
    • The Pietermaritzburg meeting was a dog show; it started late, with progress substantially delayed because the eDRS system had to be restarted, it would not readily allow even those who had registered prior to the show, to access the system and so on. Generally, ponderous and lacking in what one would expect from such a grandiose undertaking.
    • With our state electronics in shambles, it would take a herculean effort to provide seamless swift access to the links that the system presupposes.
  • Regular readers will recall that West had reported on what dates should be reflected on a TDR when a settlement is agreement is reached after divorce. The following article fleshes this out: https://www.dupwest.co.za/OurInsights/ArticleDetail.aspx?Title=-When-does-the-Property-Transfer-clock-start-in-a-divorce
  • Again, a somewhat pumped-up version of a note published by West on the footprint of real rights of extension in a real rights sectional scheme: https://www.tech4law.co.za/business/conveyancing-in-south-africa/deviation-due-to-changed-circumstances-when-exercising-a-real-right-of-extension-conveyancing-news/
  • Banks should know by now not to sell repossessed homes for paltry sums: https://www.moneyweb.co.za/news/companies-and-deals/standard-bank-slammed-in-court-after-repossessing-and-auctioning-soweto-home-for-r200/
  • Those of us who studied Roman law, will remember judgements on liability for pushing flowerpots onto pedestrians in the street below; this is the modern version: https://www.clydeco.com/en/insights/2025/05/watch-your-step-high-court-rules-on-property-owner
  • A legal practitioner, acting on behalf of a client to enforce an option, needs a written authority in terms of the alienation of land act. The practitioner’s liability to his client will commence on the client becoming aware of the neglect. Does knowledge of a legal conclusion also initiate prescription? A Concourt decision on this is a remarkable (see at 54 and further – all 90 pages!): https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZACC/2023/46.pdf
  • One of our neighbours has replaced a single- story building with a three-story building, of which one half is partially underground. I could not help but wonder what the neighbours thought of this, given a vertical restriction against the background of the following case: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAKZDHC/2025/33.html
  • Voting thresholds relating to a body corporate decision to appoint a managing agent: https://www.saflii.org/za/cases/ZAGPJHC/2025/544.html

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Property

Trends

  • The lowering of borrowing costs was widely hailed as a predictor of potential property price growth. Yet, despite green shoots of sorts, no boom in property sales has materialised.
  • Affordability and scarcity of properties to let, has led to many purchasers, typically the younger generation, adopting live-in business property purchases. This trend is reflected in a decrease of residential vacancy rates.
  • The above trend has led to commercial buildings being re–purposed for residential living.
  • Small retail centres are outperforming their larger peers. Footfall rates for retail space generally, has surpassed pre-pandemic rates.
  • Office trends are that vacancy rates have decreased slightly on the back of a shift back to physical workplaces.
  • The industrial sector is doing well, benefiting from booming e-commerce.
  • Our Reit market has topped R250bn for the first time since 2020.

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News

  • The uptick in residential rentals demand has led to an increase in rental scams – be careful and cross-check.
  • The Club Med resort on the KZN North Coast will be opening in July.
  • Cape Town appears to be the place to go, when looking for a solid investment as the city is well-run and so on. What is often missed, is what came out of a recent report to the effect that that Cape Town had more informal dwellings than Johannesburg: think future voters and the sway held by the DA in that city… Nowhere to go!
  • Need access to affordable property? Check out https://indaohub.co.za/
  • I hold a GRM report on the current legal sector remuneration in South Africa. If this interests you, ask me for a copy.

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Legal news

Sapoa will challenge a bylaw, adopted by the city of Johannesburg, to regulate privately-owned CCTV cameras facing public spaces.

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Comment

Rainbow expectations, failure and flux: that governance in South Africa has failed, is beyond debate. Those who lead our state is bankrupt of money and ideas, as is evident on municipal, provincial and state level. The repercussions of this failure are wide-ranging; the collapse of infrastructure, public health provision, animal health, our justice system and so on. And, disconcertingly, those who govern are intent on continuing on the same path. The latest saga turns around investment which is supposed to drive jobs and improvement: the state has invested billions in infrastructure already, much of this wasted on corruption and bad management (think construction overruns, power stations and so on), the PIC has blown R33bn in bad investments and so on – now the Prez has called for more; the private sector (the state is broke) is called upon to take part in the delightfully termed infrastructure boom (a non-existent boom which the private sector must make happen). The proponents/investors, the Prez neglects to tell us, will have to be BBE compliant and, of course, our state will manage the process. This means that any white investor might well have to find an equally loaded black partner or part with a substantial part of his capital in favour of his “enabler”. Same system, same governance; the sole difference lies in using private rather than public money. If you were a betting man, would you predict a different outcome??

With any luck the roil and flux of GNU will lead elsewhere.

Lighten up (on computer systems)

Contributed by:
Daan Steenkamp Attorneys
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