South Africans selling their home face costs of over R100,000

Due to the City of Johannesburg’s disorganised building plan records, those selling their homes without approved building plans may be forced to pay between R25,000 and R100,000, if not more.

FIRZT Realty Group CEO Denese Zaslansky urged Johannesburg homeowners to obtain the approved building plans for their properties as soon as possible to avoid being forced to pay thousands of rands.

Before granting bonds to prospective buyers, banks increasingly insist that home sellers produce accurate and up-to-date building plans to ensure that all structures on the property are legal.

Zaslansky said this requirement is understandable, but is made difficult by the disarray at Johannesburg’s Metro Centre, which stored the city’s building plan records.

She said thousands of previously approved building plans are currently scattered among the disorganised heaps of files and documents.

Many of these were abandoned in various parts of the Metro Centre when it was evacuated in 2023, and are proving very difficult and slow to retrieve.

Zaslansky said the current chaotic state of the City of Johannesburg’s (CoJ) building plan records has been several years in the making.

In 2014, a conditional assessment flagged major structural and maintenance issues with the Johannesburg Metro Centre, which was built in the 1970s. However, no remedial action was taken.

Five years later, a second assessment confirmed worsening conditions, citing serious occupational health and safety concerns.

Things came to a head in July 2022, when the Johannesburg Property Company (JPC), which is the custodian of the building, was issued with a notice by the Department of Employment and Labour (DEL).

This notice was issued for the contravention of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and the National Building Regulations.

In March 2023, the DEL noted that the city had failed to comply with the contravention, improvement and prohibition notice. It then issued a notice of non-compliance and added that it would refer the matter for prosecution.

Chaos grows

A few months later, a transformer fire resulted in the building finally being evacuated. Various departments were accommodated in other buildings at significant rental expense, but many employees were also instructed to work from home.

The JPC began exploring refurbishment options for the Metro Centre, including a public-private partnership. Cost estimates started at R2 billion.

The proposals drew criticism for high costs, with some officials and councillors advocating for the building to be demolished and rebuilt. Meanwhile, it continued to fall into further disrepair with another fire breaking out in October 2024.

The JPC has since noted that it was working to implement a three-phase redevelopment plan as part of the city’s Office Space Optimisation Programme, with help from National Treasury and the Government Technical Advisory Centre (GTAC).

In June 2025, the CoJ announced a plan to “rescue” many thousands of files full of municipal records, building plans and town planning documents that were abandoned in the Metro Centre following the first fire.

These files will be moved to the department of development planning’s new temporary premises in Newtown, and a service provider will be appointed to digitise them.

“We appreciate that the CoJ has just announced a plan to rescue and reorganise those files full of building plans, town planning documents and other municipal records in a new archive in Newtown,” Zaslansky said.

“But for now, according to various architects we work with, most staff of the city’s displaced development planning department are still working from home.”

Sellers face high costs

In the meantime, while the CoJ is making alternative arrangements, Zaslansky explained that architects have only two hours a day to access the shuttered Metro Centre to find plans and any other documents that are officially requested.

“This means that home sellers who don’t have their own copies of previously approved plans now often have no choice but to commission an architect to draw up new ‘as-built’ plans and have those approved,” she said.

“This could cost them anything from around R25,000 to R100,000 or even more, depending on the age, size and condition of their property and how complicated the plan approval process is.”

These costs could include:

• Architect’s fees for measuring an existing home and drafting “as-built” plans, starting from around R20,000 for a 250sqm single-storey home and R28,000 for a double-storey building
• Current CoJ submission fees to get the plans examined and approved are R25 per square meter
• Additional compliance fees, including around R2,500 for the engineer’s sign-off on structural elements, and anything from R850 to R5,000 for fire department and HOA approvals
• Another R3,500 is paid for sustainable building regulation exemptions if the home was built before 2011; and
• R30,000 or more for the removal of any restrictive title deed clauses

“The architect will also need to check if the property is correctly zoned for what has been built,” Zaslansky explained.

If not, they either have to submit a new Site Development Plan for approval or, in the worst-case scenario, start a rezoning process for the property. “This would add a further cost.”

If the building is over 60 years old, the plans will also need to be approved by the Heritage Council, and if a building line needs to be relaxed, the town planning department will need to agree.

Any additional approvals can take up to three months to obtain, before the plans can finally be sent to the building control office to be checked and signed off, which can take two weeks to two months.

As a result, Zaslansky said the time required to approve the new plans will often exceed the time it would take to transfer the property.

“But where plans are not immediately available, the parties can attach a signed annexure to the sale agreement to delay transfer until approved plans are secured.”

“Alternatively, if the seller cannot afford to pay for new approved plans, they can agree to allow the conveyancer to withhold an agreed sum from the sale proceeds to cover the cost of obtaining the plans post-sale.”

At this stage, approved building plans are not a transfer requirement. However, as per the National Building Regulations, all structures erected must have planning approval from a local authority and be built according to the approved plans.

She added that homeowners need to get revised plans approved if they make any structural alterations or change the use of any part of the building.

This could include making alterations to internal or external walls, or converting a garage to a home office, or adding carports and pools.