From signed Offer to Purchase to Deeds Office registration
Signed OTP
Offer to Purchase signed by both parties; ALA s 2(1) writing requirement met.
Conveyancer appointed
Seller typically appoints; FICA opens; matter file created.
FICA + documents
IDs, proof of address, marital status, trust/company docs, source of funds.
Clearances requested
Municipal rates clearance (s 118 MSA); levy clearance (sectional title).
Transfer duty to SARS
TDC01 declaration; duty paid via conveyancer trust account; receipt issued.
Bond coordination
Transferring + bond registration + bond cancellation attorneys synchronise.
Lodgement at Deeds Office
Pretoria Deeds Office; examination typically 7–10 working days.
Registration + payout
Registrar signs; purchase price released to seller; new title deed issued.
Typical total timeline: 8–12 weeks for a bonded purchase; 6–8 weeks for a cash purchase.
Step 1 — Signed Offer to Purchase
Every property transfer begins with a written, signed Offer to Purchase (OTP) — the sale agreement between buyer and seller. Under section 2(1) of the Alienation of Land Act 68 of 1981, no sale of immovable property is enforceable in South Africa unless it is reduced to writing and signed by both parties or their duly authorised agents. A verbal agreement, a handshake, or an unsigned draft creates no obligation to transfer.
A well-drafted OTP records the purchase price, the parties, a precise description of the property, the occupation date, the date of possession and risk, and any suspensive conditions — conditions that must be fulfilled before the sale becomes unconditional. The most common suspensive is that the buyer must obtain mortgage bond approval within a stated period; if the bond is declined by the deadline, the suspensive fails and the OTP lapses without penalty. We cover this in detail in our forthcoming guide to suspensive conditions in OTPs.
The OTP also nominates the transferring attorney. By long-standing South African convention the seller nominates the conveyancer, although the estate agent frequently recommends the firm and the buyer may ask for a specific firm to be recorded. Once the OTP is signed by both parties and any suspensive conditions are met, the transfer becomes a live matter — and the clock starts.
Step 2 — Conveyancer appointed and instructed
A copy of the signed OTP reaches the nominated conveyancer — an attorney admitted to draft and sign deeds — usually within one to three working days of signature. On receipt of the instruction we open the matter, assign a conveyancing secretary, allocate the trust banking details, and send a formal instruction letter to the buyer and seller setting out the pro-forma costs, the expected timeline, and the FICA and financial documents required from each side. This first letter is where we also flag any suspensive conditions whose deadlines we will need to diarise.
Within the same week we will request a Deeds Office search against the property to pull the current title deed, verify the registered owner, and surface any existing bonds, interdicts or caveats. If the seller’s bond must be cancelled, we notify the seller’s existing bank in writing so that the bank can appoint its own bond cancellation attorney; if the buyer has obtained a bond grant, we liaise directly with the bond registration attorney appointed by the buyer’s bank. The matter now has three sets of attorneys running in parallel — and our job is to keep them on the same page.
Step 3 — FICA documents collected
Every conveyancer is an accountable institution under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001 (FICA) and is legally required to verify the identity, residential address and source of funds of every client before acting. Missing FICA is the single most common reason a transfer is stuck in its first fortnight — please assemble the correct documents before instructing us, not after. The requirements differ for natural persons and for juristic entities such as companies and trusts.
| Natural persons | Companies, close corporations and trusts |
|---|---|
| Green bar-coded ID or South African Smart ID card (passport for non-residents). | CIPC registration certificate (CoR 14.3) and the memorandum of incorporation, or the trust deed with the latest Letters of Authority issued by the Master. |
| Proof of residence no older than three months — municipal utility bill, bank statement or rental contract. | Proof of registered address of the entity — current utility bill or lease in the entity’s name. |
| Marital status proof — marriage certificate and any antenuptial contract, or final divorce order where applicable. | Resolution authorising the transaction and nominating the signatory, plus FICA on every director, member, trustee and ultimate beneficial owner. |
| SARS tax reference number confirmation — pin letter or latest IT34 assessment. | Entity tax number and Tax Compliance Status (TCS) pin for the transfer duty submission. |
| Source-of-funds declaration with bank statements or proof of the sale of an existing property. | Source-of-funds declaration from the entity, plus FICA on any funder or shareholder providing the acquisition funding. |
We run the electronic FICA verification against the Department of Home Affairs and the major credit bureaux in parallel with the physical document check. In straightforward cases FICA is closed within a week; where a director or trustee is abroad, or a marital regime must be traced across a jurisdictional change, it can take considerably longer.
Step 4 — Rates, levy, and other clearances
Before the Registrar of Deeds will entertain a transfer, the property must be clear of municipal and scheme-level debt. Under section 118(1) of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act, the municipality must issue a rates clearance certificate confirming that all rates, refuse, water and sewerage charges due in the previous two years have been paid. We apply for the clearance figures, pay them on the seller’s behalf from the trust account on registration, and lodge the certificate with the transfer. Tshwane typically issues figures within 10 to 15 working days; the certificate itself is valid for a further 60 days from date of issue.
If the property is in a sectional title scheme or a homeowners’ association (HOA), an additional levy clearance certificate must be obtained from the body corporate or the HOA under section 15B(3)(a)(i)(aa) of the Sectional Titles Act 95 of 1986. The managing agent will refuse to issue the certificate until all levies, special levies and fines are paid up to the end of the current period. Sectional title arrears are a classic cause of a transfer’s collapse — the earlier the seller settles them, the better.
In parallel, if the buyer is foreign or if the transfer involves agricultural land, additional consents are required — SARB exchange-control approval for non-resident buyers and, for agricultural land, the Minister’s consent under the Subdivision of Agricultural Land Act 70 of 1970. These are niche paths but they stop a transfer dead if left until lodgement.
Step 5 — Transfer duty to SARS
Transfer duty is the tax charged by the South African Revenue Service on the acquisition of immovable property. The buyer pays it. Properties purchased for R1,210,000 or less are currently exempt; above that threshold the rate scales in progressive brackets, reaching 13% on the portion of the purchase price above R13,310,000. A VAT-registered seller who sells in the course of an enterprise invoices VAT instead, and transfer duty is then not payable. Always verify the current thresholds on the official SARS transfer duty page at the time of your transaction — the Minister of Finance periodically adjusts the brackets.
The conveyancer prepares a transfer duty declaration on SARS e-Filing, the buyer signs it electronically, the buyer pays the duty into the conveyancer’s trust account, and the conveyancer settles SARS on the buyer’s behalf. SARS then issues the transfer duty receipt — without which the Deeds Office will not register the transfer. Typical turnaround is 5 to 10 working days once the declaration is accepted. For worked examples, brackets and exemptions, see our full spoke on transfer duty in South Africa.
Step 6 — Coordinating with the bond attorney
A bonded residential transfer is a three-way dance. The transferring attorney (us, appointed by the seller) drafts the deed of transfer; the bond registration attorney, appointed by the buyer’s bank, drafts the new mortgage bond in favour of that bank; and the bond cancellation attorney, appointed by the seller’s existing bank, prepares the cancellation of the seller’s old bond. All three firms must ultimately file their deeds at the Deeds Office on the same day.
Simultaneous registration matters for a simple reason: the seller’s old bond can only be cancelled once the transfer goes through, the transfer can only go through once the purchase price is in place, and the purchase price is only in place once the buyer’s new bond registers. Lodging the three deeds together ensures that, at the stroke of the Registrar’s pen, ownership passes, the old bond falls away, the new bond takes its place, and the purchase funds flow — all on the same day, in the right order, with no moment at which any party is exposed. We explain the mechanics in our forthcoming spoke on bond registration.
Coordination is a logistics exercise as much as a legal one. We send drafts for approval, collect signatures from buyer and seller on the bond and transfer papers, reconcile financial figures between the three firms, and set the lodgement date only when every document is signed, every rand is in the right trust account, and every clearance certificate is in hand. A single missing signature from a director or a missing tax certificate from SARS is enough to postpone lodgement by a week — so the work in step 6 is, in practice, about removing every last reason a deed might be “noted” by an examiner.
Step 7 — Lodgement at the Pretoria Deeds Office
Lodgement is the act of physically presenting the signed, duty-paid, clearance-backed transfer deed and its supporting documents for registration. In Pretoria, where our office lodges daily, deeds are delivered to the Deeds Office by the conveyancer’s registered messenger, scanned into the registry’s system, and given a lodgement number that travels with the deed through examination. The Deeds Registries Act 47 of 1937, accessible via gov.za, governs every step of this process.
The typical queue between lodgement and first examination is 7 to 10 working days in Pretoria — although it expands sharply before long weekends, year-end, and whenever staff capacity contracts. A deed lodged together with a bond registration and a bond cancellation is linked electronically by barcode so that the three cannot be registered out of sequence. If any of the three is rejected on examination, all three “fall out” of the batch and must be re-lodged after correction — which is why pre-lodgement review matters.
The registry is in a protracted transition to electronic deeds registration (e-DRS) for qualifying deed types. e-DRS will eventually collapse the queue between lodgement and registration, but at the time of writing most residential transfers still move through the paper-based workflow. Being physically close to the Pretoria registry — and familiar with its examiners, its messengers, and its internal flow — materially shortens the feedback loop when a deed is noted for correction.
Step 8 — Examination and registration
Every lodged deed is scrutinised on three levels: a junior examiner checks basic compliance — names, ID numbers, property description, duty and clearance — against the title deed in the registry’s archive; a senior examiner interrogates the more intricate points — marital regimes, trust authority, resolutions, bond linkages, power-of-attorney formalities — and either passes the deed, or “notes” it for correction with a handwritten flag; finally an assistant registrar or the Registrar signs off on any noted corrections and approves the deed for registration.
On the morning the deeds are through all three levels, the conveyancer or their correspondent attends the Deeds Office at about 09h30 for the “prep” session — the final check of each deed against the day’s registration batch. The Registrar of Deeds then signs the deeds into the record at approximately 10h00, and the deeds are officially registered. From that moment the buyer is the legal owner of the property; the seller’s old bond is cancelled; and the buyer’s new bond is a registered security against the new title.
Money flows on the afternoon of registration. The buyer’s bank releases the bond funds into the transferring attorney’s trust account, where they join any cash the buyer has already deposited. From that pool we pay the outstanding rates and levies, the bond cancellation bank its settlement figure, the estate agent its commission, ourselves our fee, and the seller the net purchase price. We notify every party the same day, send the registered deed to the bank for the bank’s title-deed file (or to the buyer directly, for a cash purchase), and close the matter.
Typical timelines
The eight steps above always happen in sequence, but how long they take depends on the finance structure and any complicating facts. The ranges below cover a well-run Pretoria transfer where FICA is complete on day one and no unusual facts intervene.
| Transfer profile | Typical end-to-end | Critical path |
|---|---|---|
| Cash purchase, freehold | 6 to 8 weeks | Rates clearance and transfer duty |
| Bonded purchase, freehold or sectional | 8 to 12 weeks | Bond grant and three-way lodgement |
| Complicated matters (estate, trust, non-resident, agricultural) | 12 to 16+ weeks | Master’s Office, SARB, or Minister’s consent |
What causes transfer delays?
Delay is usually not attributable to the Deeds Office itself — it sits earlier in the chain, at points where a document, a signature or a figure must come from a third party. The seven most frequent causes we see:
- Rates clearance backlogs — the municipality or body corporate takes longer than expected to issue figures, or the seller’s arrears are larger than anticipated.
- Delayed bond approval — re-submissions, valuation queries, or the buyer’s affordability being re-scored after retrenchment or a credit event.
- FICA gaps — missing proof of residence, a non-current ID, or source-of-funds that cannot be traced to a bank account.
- Tax non-compliance — an unpaid SARS account blocks the transfer duty declaration; the seller’s TCS pin is outstanding.
- Examiner “notes” — the deed is sent back for correction on an intricate point (marital regime, trust resolution, power-of-attorney wording), resetting the lodgement clock.
- Signatory unavailability — a director abroad, an emigrating seller, or an executor who must be traced or replaced.
- Linked transfers — the buyer’s purchase is funded by the sale of an existing property, and either leg slips.
- Seasonal peaks — the two-week window before year-end and the lead-up to long weekends genuinely do slow the registry.
Frequently asked questions
Partly, yes. The steps you control are FICA compliance, paying the buyer’s costs and transfer duty promptly, and signing documents without delay. The steps you do not control — municipal clearance turnaround, bond approval, examiner throughput at the Deeds Office — are where most “slow” transfers stall.
The single highest-leverage thing a buyer or seller can do is assemble complete FICA and marital-status documents before the OTP is signed. That alone often shortens a transfer by one to two weeks.
By long-standing South African practice, the seller appoints the transferring attorney. The estate agent often recommends a firm, but the decision is the seller’s. The buyer pays the transferring attorney’s fees, but the fees follow the tariff guideline — they do not vary with who chose the firm — so there is no cost to the seller in exercising the nomination. The OTP should record the appointment.
A signed OTP is a binding sale agreement. Absent a valid suspensive condition that has not been fulfilled, neither party can walk away without the other’s consent. A buyer who refuses to proceed may be sued for specific performance or for the seller’s damages and wasted costs; a seller who refuses may likewise be compelled to transfer.
There is one important statutory exit: under section 29A of the Alienation of Land Act, a purchaser of property for residential purposes at a price of R250,000 or less has a five-day cooling-off right. This threshold is low and rarely applies to modern Pretoria sales. Above it, a signed OTP is a signed deal.
Yes, and a cash transfer is typically the fastest and cleanest transfer there is. Step 6 (bond attorney coordination) falls away entirely, and the transferring attorney lodges alone. A clean cash transfer in Pretoria often registers in 6 to 8 weeks rather than 8 to 12. The buyer still pays transfer duty to SARS and the conveyancer’s fee, and the seller still pays any bond cancellation costs if the seller had an existing bond — but the three-way lodgement logistics are replaced by a single-deed lodgement.