It’s three weeks before the AGM and the notice has to go out. Someone asks for the owner list. You end up with three of them: the managing agent’s levy roll, a spreadsheet a previous trustee made in 2022, and the security company’s gate-access list. They disagree about roughly a fifth of the units.
So the notice goes to the levy roll, a couple of owners who sold last year get it anyway, and a new owner in unit 12 hears about the meeting from a neighbour.
That’s not a disaster. But it’s the same register you’ll need at 02:00 when a geyser bursts in unit 14 and water is coming through the ceiling of unit 9. At that point you don’t need to know who owns unit 14. You need a phone number for whoever is living there.
Why the register drifts
Nobody sets out to keep a bad register. It goes out of date because of the way changes reach the scheme. Usually they don’t reach it at all.
Transfers. A unit can’t be transferred without a levy clearance certificate from the body corporate, so somebody always knows about a sale: usually the managing agent’s accounts team. That doesn’t mean the trustees, security or the register ever hear about it.
Tenants. Leases change with no transfer and no paperwork crossing the body corporate’s desk. An owner in Cape Town may not know their rental agent put a new tenant in three months ago.
Contact details. People change numbers and email addresses and stop reading the one they gave you in 2019.
Copies. Every time the list is exported “just for this,” there’s a new copy that will never be updated again. The spreadsheet with the most recent date on it isn’t always the most accurate one.
It’s personal information, so POPIA applies
A register of names, unit numbers, phone numbers, email addresses and vehicle registrations is personal information under the Protection of Personal Information Act. The body corporate is responsible for it.
In practice, that means a few things most schemes get wrong:
- Collect it for a reason. You need owner contact details to run meetings and collect levies, and occupant details for emergencies and access control. That’s a good reason. “We might need it someday” isn’t.
- Limit who can see it. Emailing the full owners’ list to every trustee, the security company and the garden service isn’t limiting anything.
- Keep it accurate. Accuracy is an obligation, not a nice-to-have. A register full of former owners is a compliance problem as well as an admin one.
- Don’t let copies multiply. Every spreadsheet attachment is another copy you can’t update or delete.
The easiest way to meet all of that is one register that people are given access to, instead of one file that gets sent around.
What a register that stays current looks like
- It’s built around the unit, not the person. Units don’t change. People do. Put each person against a unit with a role, such as owner, tenant or rental agent, instead of keeping a list of people who happen to have unit numbers.
- One person can appear more than once. An investor who owns three units is one person with three owner links, not three rows that drift apart.
- Owner and occupant are separate. The AGM notice goes to one and the burst-pipe call goes to the other. Sometimes they’re the same person. Often they’re not.
- Updates happen in one place. When the managing agent processes a transfer or a trustee hears about a new tenant, the change goes into the register everyone already uses, not into their own copy.
Where to start
Don’t try to verify all the units in one weekend.
- Start from the levy roll. It’s the most reliable source of owners, because someone is being billed and would complain if it were wrong.
- Add occupants unit by unit as you hear from people. Log every burst pipe, gate remote request and parcel delivery against the unit. Within a few months, most of the gaps fill themselves.
- Ask once a year. Include a short “please confirm who lives in your unit” request with the AGM notice. Owners already expect paperwork then.
- Delete the old spreadsheets. This is the hardest step and the one that matters most.
Once the register is accurate, it’s still accurate a year later, as long as every update goes into that one register.
