When the head of South Africa’s biggest property owners’ body says the industry has to stop watching from the sidelines, it’s worth paying attention.
Speaking at the SA Property Owners Association’s 60th convention, Sapoa president Itumeleng Mothibeli argued that the property sector depends on municipalities that work, and that it needs a seat at the table where their future is decided. His message was blunt: “We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines anymore.”
The numbers explain why. According to the Auditor-General, only 39 of South Africa’s 257 municipalities received clean audits for 2024/25. Struggling councils under pressure to collect revenue tend to reach for the same lever: rates and tariffs.
Sapoa is responding by pushing harder on municipal budgets, rates policies, tariffs and revenue collection. It has also been running a project to measure how municipal rates affect property values, and it plans to feed that analysis into government’s upcoming white paper on local government reform.
For individual owners, the lesson is simple. Your municipal valuation directly affects what you pay every month. Valuations can be wrong, and objections have deadlines. If the country’s largest landlords are scrutinising rates more closely, homeowners and smaller property owners should be doing the same.
Read the full article on Business Day here.