Buying or selling property is, for most people, the largest single transaction of their lives — and the one where the least is explained. A deposit is paid, documents are signed, and then weeks pass with no word.
We work differently. Your transfer is handled by an admitted conveyancer, and you are told what stage it has reached, what is holding it up, and who is being chased.
What a conveyancer actually does
A conveyancer is an attorney who has passed a further national examination and been admitted by the High Court to pass transfer of immovable property. Only a conveyancer may lodge a deed in the Deeds Office.
The work is part legal, part logistical. We draft and sign the transfer documents, obtain the transfer duty receipt from SARS, secure rates clearance from the municipality and levy clearance from the body corporate or homeowners association, liaise with the bond attorney and the cancellation attorney, and lodge the batch in the Deeds Office — where it is examined, and either registered or rejected on a query that has to be cured and re-lodged.
Sectional title and estates
Sectional title transfers carry their own requirements: a levy clearance certificate from the body corporate, a conduct rules check, and — where an exclusive use area such as a parking bay or garden is involved — a cession registered alongside the transfer. Property inside a homeowners association usually requires the association’s written consent to transfer as well.
These are the details that quietly derail a transfer when nobody is watching for them.
Bonds
If you are financing the purchase, your bank appoints an attorney to register the bond, and that registration must happen simultaneously with the transfer. If the seller has an existing bond, a third attorney cancels it. Three firms, one Deeds Office lodgement, and every one of them has to be ready on the same day.
Coordinating that is the part of conveyancing that most affects your timeline, and it is the part we treat as our responsibility rather than the bank’s.