Housing governance is where statute meets daily life. When procedure slides into habit, participation shrinks to those who shout loudest or live closest.
When the official minutes of my sectional title scheme reduced my formal statutory submission to “a letter of concern from an owner living abroad” I realised how easily the law can disappear once managing agents and trustees control the record.
As both attorney and owner, I had lodged a written submission under the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act 8 of 2011 (STSMA) and its Prescribed Management Rules (PMRs). It cited the relevant provisions, requested that it be tabled and minuted, and raised specific legal issues. What appeared later was a paraphrased version that stripped it of legal force.
Distance, age and the absence of a local attorney-firm letterhead made it easier to downplay my participation, a familiar pattern in many schemes, where owners who are younger, abroad or less visible are treated as peripheral contributors. Yet ownership alone confers full membership rights; the law does not rank owners by geography or demographics.
The issue has gained new urgency following the Community Schemes Ombud Service (CSOS) Consolidated Practice Directives 2025, signed on 18 July 2025, which re-emphasise trustees’ record-keeping, disclosure and maintenance obligations. This directive consolidates and replaces all previous CSOS practice documents, setting a uniform national standard for governance in community schemes. It explicitly reaffirms that rules or practices inconsistent with the STSMA or the PMRs, so-called undesirable rules, will not be recognised, and it imposes stricter expectations around proper minutes, transparency and equal treatment of owners.
The directive aims to standardise compliance across community schemes, but its impact will depend on whether managing agents and trustees actually apply its requirements beyond the paperwork.
When culture trumps the law
Three duties sit at the heart of every body corporate under the Sectional Title Schemes Management Act:
Record-keeping: Accurate minutes of all general and trustee meetings must be kept, and trustees are obliged to ensure those minutes are properly kept. Any owner may inspect these records within 10 days of a written request.
Proxies: A proxy “need not be an owner, but must not be the managing agent or any of his or her employees, or an employee of the body corporate”.
Maintenance: The body corporate is obliged to maintain the common property. A written maintenance, repair and replacement plan (MRRP) for major capital items expected to require work within the next 10 years is stipulated in the Act.
The rules are unambiguous, but convenience often wins.
The CSOS 2025 directive directly echoes these provisions, requiring trustees to maintain verifiable, accessible records and prohibiting governance practices that obscure accountability. It reinforces that accurate minutes are a statutory duty, not an administrative option.
When convenience becomes control
Before the AGM, I questioned a proxy form stating that, failing attendance, the “chairperson of the meeting or his/her nominee” would act as proxy. That default clause risks appointing a disqualified proxy under the Act, because the “nominee” might be the managing agent or its employee, and upon closer inspection, it often is.
The agent’s reply was that my correspondence had been shared with the trustees. Later, the minutes reduced it to “a letter of concern”. When a formal request for inclusion in the minutes becomes a “concern”, the legal request disappears from the record, and with it, accountability.
The July 2025 CSOS Directive reiterates that trustees remain collectively responsible for record-keeping and decision-making, duties that cannot be outsourced to managing agents. It also requires that schemes avoid undesirable rules and unapproved proxy formats that limit member participation or contradict the PMRs. Yet convenience continues to erode those safeguards, exposing how far administrative routine still diverges from the law’s intent.
The managing agent filter
In this scheme, administered by a large national property management company, the trustees’ PAIA manual shows that the role of information officer, responsible for access-to-information requests, was delegated to a director of that same company. In effect, the same company that drafts and circulates the records also decides who may see them.
That concentration of control is not unlawful, but it undermines transparency. Owners requesting records must route the request through the very entity whose practices may be questioned, a circular process that blurs the independence PAIA and the STSMA are meant to secure.
The CSOS 2025 Directive underscores this danger: it calls for the separation of compliance, governance and administrative functions to prevent conflicts of interest and ensure independent oversight.
When familiarity replaces oversight
In many complexes, the chairperson is a long-time resident with close ties to the managing agent. Familiarity blurs oversight: the agent drafts, the trustees endorse, and members inherit the record as fact.
The STSMA gives authority to the trustees collectively, not to the chairperson or the managing agent. Yet template-driven practice often turns those collective duties into administrative routine. This isn’t corruption in the criminal sense; it’s a culture of deference that erodes accountability.
A close reading of the documents in my scheme shows another procedural gap: the AGM minutes record the election of trustees but no follow-up trustee resolution electing a chairperson. Yet the trustee report, issued on the managing agent’s template, lists a chairperson as already confirmed. That sequence creates the impression of appointment without visible resolution. Owners should simply request the missing record; transparency should never depend on assumption.
Here again, the CSOS 2025 Directive provides a benchmark: every appointment, resolution and delegated duty must be properly minuted and available for inspection. Failure to maintain those records can attract compliance sanctions under the directive’s oversight framework.
Absentee doesn’t mean absent rights
A persistent myth holds that owners who live abroad or seldom attend meetings are lesser members. The STSMA says otherwise. Lawful proxies and accurate minutes exist precisely to protect remote participation.
When distance or demographics become pretexts for exclusion, compliance ceases to be administrative; it becomes constitutional.
The CSOS 2025 Directive reinforces this by requiring that all owners be treated equally in participation, voting and access to records, regardless of residence or visibility.
‘Everyone does it this way’ isn’t compliance
Typical explanations – “we’ve always used this form”, “minutes are just summaries”, “we need proxies for quorum” – are heard in schemes nationwide.
But the PMRs already solve low attendance through adjournment rules. Shortcuts through broad proxies or selective minutes might save time, but they hollow out democracy.
Under the 2025 Directive, such practices could now be deemed “undesirable” if they weaken owner rights or misrepresent decisions.
What needs to change
This is not about one complex or one managing agent. It is a structural flaw replicated across thousands of schemes.
Owners should:
- Reject proxy forms that default to the chairperson or a vague “nominee”;
- Label correspondence clearly (“Owner submission for tabling and inclusion in the minutes”);
- Check AGM minutes and request corrections for omissions; and
- Use CSOS to enforce compliance and PAIA to obtain records, which belong to the scheme, not the agent.
Regulators should:
- Require compliance training for managing agents;
- Audit proxy and minute templates for legality;
- Promote separation of the information officer function from managing agent operations to restore independent oversight; and
- Ensure implementation of the CSOS Consolidated Practice Directives 2025 through audits and sanctions so that statutory reform translates into day-to-day accountability.
Law, applied evenly
Housing governance is where statute meets daily life. When procedure slides into habit, participation shrinks to those who shout loudest or live closest.
The STSMA and its PMRs are not guidelines; they are law. The 2025 Directive was meant to revive that principle of even application, yet its promise depends on how owners and trustees choose to apply it.
Compliance is democracy in miniature. When trustees or agents treat those rules as negotiable, the law stops at the complex gate. It’s time it walked through.
Public interest note
This commentary is written in the public interest to promote transparent, lawful management of sectional title schemes and to encourage informed participation by owners. It highlights systemic patterns rather than individual conduct and invites continued discussion on governance reform in community schemes.
Written by: Annerize Kolbé
Annerize Shaw (Kolbé) is a corporate and commercial attorney of the High Court of South Africa, and a member of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London. She is a published author in the field of international comparative law, with a focus on corporate compliance and legal sector transformation.
This article reflects the author’s personal experience and analysis of documents distributed to members of a sectional title scheme. The views expressed are offered for information and public interest discussion. No statement should be read as alleging misconduct by any named or identifiable party.
This article was orginally published on Daily Maverick
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