Service 01
Formalising tenure
The house was allocated to you, but the title deed was never issued, or was issued in a name that is not yours.
Khayelitsha, Cape Town
A title deed is the paper that says the house is yours.
The Tenure Support Centre helps households in Khayelitsha get that paper — and fix it when something on it is wrong. We work through formal, legal channels, and we stay with you while it is resolved.
A drawing, not a survey of any particular plot. Every title deed problem comes down to a boundary, a document, or both.
2,000+
Clients helped since 2018
4
Kinds of title deed problem we take on
3
Groups we work with: households, service providers, policymakers
2018
The year we started, in Khayelitsha
01 — Why we exist
You can live in a house for years and still not own it.
A title deed is the official record of who owns a property. Without one — or with one that carries the wrong name, a deceased person's name, or a description that does not match the house on the ground — a household cannot deal with its own home.
These problems are common, they are mostly fixable, and they are almost never solved by waiting. What they need is someone to work out which office holds the file, what is missing from it, and what has to happen next.
That is what the Tenure Support Centre does. We are an action-research initiative: we help individual households resolve their title deed problems through formal, legal channels, and we record what we learn from that work so that the systems causing the problems can be fixed.
Our office is in Khayelitsha. For the households we take on, the work is practical: advice on which documents are needed, preparing the legal documents for transfer, working with partner conveyancers, following up with City officials, and explaining each step as it happens.
Run jointly
The TSC is run jointly by 71point4, a data science consultancy, and the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa. See who funds and supports the work.
02 — What we take on
Four kinds of title deed problem.
If your situation looks like one of these, bring it to us. If it looks like none of them, bring it anyway — the first step is working out what kind of problem it is.
Service 02
Regularising a past informal transaction
The house changed hands informally at some point in the past, and ownership was never recorded in the deeds registry.
Service 03
Transfer out of a deceased estate
The person named on the deed has died, and the property has to be transferred to the heirs before it can be dealt with.
Service 04
A first transfer that never happened
The house came from a government subsidy programme, and the transfer from the state to the household was never completed.
03 — Who we work with
Three groups, and the problems that sit between them.
Helping one household at a time is the work. Understanding why the problem happened in the first place is the reason the work is worth recording.
Households
The people we sit with. We take on the individual case, work through the formal process with them, and tell them plainly where it has got to.
Service providers
Conveyancers, housing officials and others who handle these transactions. We work with them on the administrative processes that decide whether a case moves or stalls.
Policymakers
The people who can change the rules. We publish what the casework shows, so that the fix is aimed at the cause rather than the symptom.
04 — What we publish
The casework becomes evidence.
Every case we take on tells us something about how the system is working. We write it up and publish it openly.
-
Primary Transfer Toolkit — Toolkit
Practical guidance for the transfer of subsidy housing into the name of the household living in it. -
From Counting Houses to Making Houses Count —
Report
Why counting housing delivery is not the same as delivering secure tenure. -
Housing Accounting: Quantifying the Title Deeds Backlog in South
Africa — Study
An attempt to put a number on how many houses are occupied but not registered. -
Lessons from the TSC — five years on —
Report
What five years of casework in Khayelitsha showed about where title deed problems come from.
Start here
You do not need to know what your problem is called.
Bring the papers you have and tell us what happened. The first thing we do is work out which kind of problem it is.