Selling
Selling your house in Cape Town’s northern suburbs
Before you sign anything.
Most of what goes wrong in a sale is decided before the property is listed — in the pricing, the paperwork and the things nobody mentioned. Four of them are worth an hour of your time now.
Four things to do before you sell
- 01
Get the electrical certificate done first
Before you list, not after you accept an offer. If there is R15 000 of remedial work hiding in the DB board, you want that in your pricing decision — not landing on you three weeks before transfer.
- 02
Give your bank 90 days' notice
One phone call. Without it, your bank charges interest for the remainder of the notice period when the bond is cancelled. On a R900 000 bond that is roughly R25 000 for a call you could make today.
- 03
Know your number before you meet an agent
Not the asking price — the number that reaches your account. Work it out yourself first and you will have a very different conversation about commission and about price.
- 04
Decide what you're actually optimising for
Highest price, fastest sale and least disruption are three different strategies, and they pull against each other. Most sellers have never been asked which one matters most to them.
Read before you list
- Estate agent commission — what’s normal, and what’s actually negotiableThere is no fixed commission rate in South Africa. Here is what agents really charge, what the VAT does to it, when it becomes payable, and how to negotiate without ending up with a worse sale.
- Every certificate you need to sell — and which ones Cape Town addsElectrical, plumbing, gas, electric fence and beetle. Which are legally required, which are only contractual, what they cost, and the one that catches sellers in the City of Cape Town specifically.
- Selling a property in a deceased estateWhat an executor can and cannot do, why the Master of the High Court sets the timeline, when the property can be marketed versus when it can transfer, and how to keep an eighteen-month process from becoming a two-year one.
- Selling your South African property when you live overseasThe withholding tax, signing from abroad, and getting the proceeds out — written for owners who no longer live here.
- Downscaling, or moving into a retirement villageLife rights versus sectional title, sequencing the sale, and the costs people do not see coming.
Where I sell
The Tygerberg and Table Bay corridor — a deliberately small patch. Pricing accuracy comes from knowing streets rather than cities, and you cannot know streets across half a metro.
See the areas