Estate Living Magazine #liveyourbestlife - Issue 46 December 2019 | Page 31

D E V E L O P
practitioner is any person or entity that markets, sells or lets
immovable property on behalf of another person for some form
of gain. This, by interpretation, would include estate agents, rental
agents, mortgage originators, property inspectors, valuators,
property managers and property developers – along with
anybody (or bodies!) that acts as a facilitator of an agreement of
sale or lease … which would include a homeowners association.
Notable exclusions from this definition are attorneys and candidate
attorneys, sheriffs of the court, and a person offering property
practitioner services (but not in the normal course of their business).
Unless a developer is a natural person selling his or her own property,
all property developers must comply with the act.
Finally, Section 67 has another interesting surprise. The act requires
sellers of a property to disclose all property defects – and it does
not distinguish between latent and patent defects. A property
practitioner may not accept a mandate to sell or let a property
(residential or commercial) without receiving a mandatory
disclosure form from the seller or lessor. That signed disclosure form
then forms part of the sale or lease agreement. If a written disclosure
is not included, the agreement will be interpreted as if no defects or
deficiencies were disclosed.
More sections and subclauses will, of course, come under the
microscope as the Property Practitioners Act comes into effect, and
a few kinks will naturally have to be ironed out along the way (that’s
why regulations exist!).
Something that property developers will have to get used to,
though, is the idea that they’re not developers anymore. They’re
now, officially, property practitioners!
Mark van Dijk
Then in Section 58, it states that a property practitioner may not enter
into any arrangement (formally or informally) ‘whereby a consumer
is obliged or encouraged to use a particular service provider
including an attorney to render any service or ancillary services in
respect of any transaction of which that property practitioner was
the effective cause.’ In other words, property practitioners aren’t
allowed to specify that a particular service provider is preferred to
the exclusion of other service providers.
D
In terms of Section 55, property practitioners are now required to
keep all records – that’s all correspondence, legal agreements, and
copies of advertising and marketing materials – for a period of five
years. The good news is that these can be stored electronically;
the bad news is that you’re going to have to keep all your fliers and
adverts saved on a hard drive somewhere for half a decade.
I N V E S T
For developers, there are three stand-out sections of the act that
deserve close attention.
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