A Conveyancer’s Diary

Of cattle, horses and other animals


“Except with the consent of the Administrator, no cattle and no horse, cow pig or goat or other animal of a similar nature shall be kept on the erf.”


Thus reads one of the conditions in a title deed of a residential property situated in the heart of Westville.


I was checking the new transfer documents and found the condition. It now troubles me. Do I leave the condition in the new deed or do I remove it? Something about this bothers me and somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory I have this notion that conditions of this “nature” must be left out.

I had another (good) look at the circular from our Pietermaritzburg Registrar of Deeds number 2 of 2009 in which she dealt with those conditions that must be omitted from title deeds by virtue of the KwaZulu-Natal Planning and Development Act of 2008. These are conditions in favour of the Administrator [nowadays the Premier of the Province] which for example prohibit subdivision of prohibit the erection of a row of tenement houses, and so on. But nothing is mentioned about cattle or the other animals.

What to do now? Do I leave the condition in and hope that my Pietermaritzburg agent will know better? Or do I take it out and hope for the best? Or do I do two pages of the draft deed, one with the condition and one without, and ask my Pietermaritzburg agent to pick the correct one? Or do I write about this in my Conveyancer’s diary and hope that one of those conveyancers or conveyancing assistants who like Flippie have so many years of vast experience that one of them will be able to shepherd my animals clause in the right direction?

Regards
Sieg



Quote:

“ . . and the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence”

From Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence

A Conveyancer’s Diary

When conveyancers (and their assistants) panic


In most transfers of properties, Transfer Duty is payable. In order to obtain the Transfer Duty receipt, certain documents are lodged at the applicable SA Revenue Services offices. We usually send our documents plus the cheque in favour of SARS, to our Pietermaritzburg agents, who then lodge these documents at the Pietermaritzburg SARS offices.

Last week we were told that SARS is no longer accepting physical i.e. paper, submission of documents and that all transfer duty receipts had to be applied for using the SARS e-Filing system. We then also found out that the e-Filing was not working so well (meaning: delays) and this was confirmed in a circular by John Christie, conveyancer of Pietermaritzburg.

Time to hit the panic buttons, we thought.

Then we received some reprieve in the form of an e mail from SARS, Pietermaritzburg telling us that an extension has been granted to 31st March 2011.

Now, I have no difficulty in going the e-Filing route, provided it works. And, it sure would have been nice if SARS could have given us some advance warning as to the cut-off date of physical paper submissions.

Regards
Sieg



Quote:

Talking of the early days of M-Net in South Africa:

“Central to M-Net’s strategy was the purchase of a decoder by the end user, which allowed the channel’s signal to be unscrambled. Since decoders were initially handmade and rare, the plan was to market them first to hotels and then to apartment buildings, where a single decoder could service multiple living units. But a major obstacle came in the form of the body corporate that governed the apartment blocks. They required a 90 per cent approval vote from members to charge residents in the building for the new pay-tv service, a majority that proved impossible to secure” [The author continues to suggest that this nearly led to the demise of the then fledgling M-Net. The 90 percent approval that she refers to, is presumably to a “unanimous resolution” in terms of the Sectional Titles Act and presumably is to the old 1971 Act as the current 1986 Act gives unanimous resolutions as an 80% figure.]

From the section on “Koos Bekker” by Cheryl Uys-Allie in South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs, compiled by Moky Makura, 2010, at p.62.

A Conveyancer’s Diary

And here we are, already well into a new year.


What will this year bring, for each of us personally, for the country, politically, sport, F1 and other events?


I am not going to make any predictions this time except maybe just one small one: I predict that our interest rates will remain more or less constant during the coming year.

Today’s note really concerns those dreaded levy clearance certificates that the conveyancer must obtain [in sectional title transfers] in order to be able to “certify” in the Section 15 B(3) certificate that all the levies have been paid up to date [or that provision to the satisfaction of the body corporate for payment has been made]. The conveyancer’s Section 15B(3) certificate is lodged at the Deeds office, and NOT, as some think it is, the levy clearance certificate.

Recently, while attending to a transfer of a sectional title unit of a “scheme” in Bonella, Durban, we were told by the Seller that there were no levies payable, that there were no trustees and there were no managing agents. We did a bit of detective work and could not find anything to help us in our quest. I was about to give up and sign the certificate so that the transfer could go through but something was worrying me about the whole issue. I did a search to establish the names of all the seventeen or so owners in this scheme and prepared a letter to each and every owner in which I pertinently asked whether that owner had any objection to the transfer going through and whether that owner was aware of any levies due, etc.

I hand delivered [personally] all seventeen letters. In some cases, the owner or a family member was at home. In other cases, I had to place the letter under the main door or between the burglar guards. We then had one single solitary phone call from one of the owners, and we managed to find out that the entire scheme was actually under administration in terms of the Sectional Titles Act, that the administrator had appointed managing agents and that my “esteemed” Seller actually owed about R30,000 (thirty thousand Rand!) in arrear levies.

The managing agents were given our undertaking, which they fortunately accepted and we paid the full arrear amount to them once the transfer had gone through. So, all’s well that ends well, in this case. I shudder to think what may have happened had I simply signed the Section 15 B(3). Not only would I (possibly) have been held personally liable for the payment of the outstanding levy, I would also have been reported to the Law Society.

Who says conveyancing is not fun?

Regards
Sieg



Quote:

“Good cannot be accomplished by evil means”

Stephen Donaldson, in Against All Things Ending: The last chronicles of Thomas Covenant, 2010 on p. 333