New ombudsman for sectional title properties

The recent appointment of a community schemes ombudsman is good news for the increasing number of homeowners in sectional title complexes and other community housing developments, as it means they should soon have access to a user-friendly dispute resolution service.

"The new ombudsman, Themba Mthethwa, has been appointed in terms of the Community Schemes Ombudsman Service Act passed in 2011, indicating that full implementation of this legislation is on the way at last," says Andrew Schaefer, managing director of national property management company Trafalgar.

The main intention of the act was to establish the Community Schemes Ombudsman Service (CSOS) that would, among other functions, provide owners, tenants, trustees, directors and managing agents of all sectional title schemes, home owners' associations (HOAs), retirement villages and share block companies with a way to resolve disputes in a cost-effective and timely manner.

Schaefer says this would represent a significant improvement on the current situation, in which the Sectional Titles Act does provide for the arbitration of disputes in sectional title schemes, but does not cover any other kind of housing scheme with shared facilities such as estates and retirement villages."

However, Schaefer says this is not the only reason why the implementation of the new legislation has been so keenly anticipated. "Importantly, the act also provides for the CSOS to become the custodian and quality controller of the governance documentation relating to all community housing schemes, to monitor compliance and to provide public access to that documentation.

"At the moment, the governance documents for different types of community schemes are kept and filed by various bodies, including the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, the Deeds Office, and some local authorities. "

Many community schemes are being run without any regard to the requirements of their governance documents, so the sooner the CSOS can establish a central, properly-controlled registry for these documents, the better. "It will then be able to fulfil another of its mandates, which is to oversee and approve any proposed changes to governance documents and management rules, while monitoring compliance, and that promises to bring about a major improvement in the overall operation of community schemes."

The new CSOS website (www.csos.org.za) outlines several other services that it will provide, while making it clear that these will be funded by means of an annual CSOS levy payable by every community housing scheme.

"However we don't foresee that this levy will be onerous," says Schaefer. "In fact we think it will be a small price for owners of property in community schemes to pay to have the CSOS in place to protect their interests."