The Tenure Support Centre

The Tenure Support Centre (TSC), previously known as the Transaction Support Centre, is an action-research project operating in Khayelitsha, a low-income neighbourhood of Cape Town. The project is a joint initiative with the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa and 71point. The TSC helps clients to formalise tenure, regularising informal property market transactions that have taken place in the past, transferring properties out of deceased estates and securing primary transfer on properties that have never been formally transferred from government to housing subsidy beneficiaries.

The TSC uses the experience of its clients from Cape Town to engage with City, Provincial and National officials and policy makers. It also engages extensively with private sector stakeholders to drive change in the affordable housing market. At the same time as responding to individual client needs, the TSC also runs projects to address underlying structural problems in the market. One example of this is the blockchain-based property register the TSC piloted for properties where no primary transfer has taken place (there is no title deed).

The TSC was launched in 2018 with funding and support from the Cities Support Programme and National Treasury. Since then the TSC has received funding from the Trust for Urban Housing Finance (TUHF) and uMastandi, and its operations are currently funded with support from the Oppenheimer Generations Fund. The TSC is also very grateful for the support of FNB who have made space available for the TSC to operate from in the FNB Khayelitsha Mall.

In 2019 / 2020 the TSC was awarded funding from the Cities Alliance to document the project’s key learnings and strategy moving forward. The report is available to read at the link below.

DOWNLOAD REPORT: THE TSC – LESSONS LEARNED

The TSC works at three levels:

Clients: The TSC provide practical assistance and support to low-income individuals with various title deed issues. The TSC advises clients on what documents they need, prepares legal documents required for transfer, liases with our partner conveyancers, follows up with City officials on specific cases and educates clients throughout the process on how the formal, legal property transfer process works.
Service providers: In the process of resolving client cases the TSC engages with multiple stakeholders and service providers across the public and private sector. The TSC uses real-life case studies to identify and highlight opportunities for improvement in key administrative processes and the need for better servicing models and product offerings from private sector players
Policymakers: The lessons learned through the TSCs day-to-day interactions with clients and service providers are fed into the policy and legislative realm through the development of case studies, policy briefs and stakeholder engagements aimed at driving long term, systematic change

Why the need for a Tenure Support Centre?

Affordable properties represent a substantial portion of the residential property market in South Africa. As at the end of 2017, of the 6.3 million formal residential properties visible on the deeds registry in South Africa almost 60% were valued at less than R600 000. Of those, 35% were considered ‘entry level’ properties valued at below R300 000 [1]. Most of these properties were built by the government as part of its RDP or subsidy housing programme. In spite of the very significant title deed backlog, CAHF estimates that approximately 1.8 million properties on the deeds registry (or 30% of all registered properties in South Africa) are RDP properties. Given that housing is the most significant asset on the household balance sheet for property-owning low income urban households, the affordable housing market offers significant wealth creating potential for beneficiary households. However, in this market households’ ability to realise value from their housing assets is significantly hampered by a number of challenges. These include:

Access to clean, undisputed title deeds (largely driven by Government’s backlog of title deed transfers and the proliferation of informal sales in this market)
The length of time to transact formally (compared to the alternative, an informal sale transaction, which is immediate)
The cost of formal sales processes relative to the property value
Limited access to mortgage finance

The extent to which these forces undermine the performance of South Africa’s affordable housing market provided the impetus to form the Tenure Support Centre (TSC).

1. CAHF (2018). Investment & economic empowerment opportunities in South Africa’s affordable housing sector. http://housingfinanceafrica.org/app/uploads/Rust_SA-housing-market-opportunity_14092018