Land Audits

Land audits conducted in terms of the requirements of the Local Government: Municipal Property Rates Act, 2004 (MPRA) as amended and the requirements of COGTA. Land Audits have been successfully completed for over 50 Municipalities in three provinces with an estimated 350 000 land parcels

Where appropriate, a land audit includes a cadastral update, see hot link to Cadastral Data Capture. The land audit is conducted using PRIMS™, which links all the datasets and provides the necessary quality assurance and anomaly reports to ensure that the process is rigorous and systematic.

The process includes, but is not limited to the following:

Data acquisition: Data acquisition includes the following datasets:

  1. Digital deeds download from the deeds office or other service provides that includes the Property, Ownership, Clearance, Bond and History tables;
  2. Cadastral data from the Surveyor-General;
  3. Current consolidated valuation roll from the Municipality or Valuation consultant;
  4. Scanned diagrams, general plans, compilations, etc. from the Surveyor-General as required.

Database Design/Loading: The deeds, valuation roll and cadastral are loaded into PRIMS™. The sectional title scheme, rate category and ownership category tables are populated and each property is updated accordingly. PRIMS™ has built in functionality to link and compare the cadastral, deeds and valuation tables and populate quantitative, qualitative and descriptive attributes.

Ownership research: PRIMS™ is used to analyze the registration status of each property and identify unregistered properties. These properties are researched and the registration status is populated to record the registered parent, grandparent or previous generation.  This process identifies properties that are notionally ‘registered’, i.e. township remainders, sectional title parents and state land.  This research is continued until the registration status of all properties has been resolved. The analysis is shown below:

Area balancing: The deeds extent is populated (and converted if necessary) from the deeds database and missing extents are captured from the original SG diagrams/general plans. PRIMS™ is used to perform the area balancing to ensure that the difference between the deeds extent (SG area) and spatial areas are within limits.

Anomaly reports are prepared to identify and remaining errors and anomalies, which are resolved. In the event of anomalies that cannot be resolved, such as area differences that result from curvilinear boundaries, a comment attribute is populated to explain the cause.

Deliverables: The deliverables/outputs of this process provide the valuation consultant with a sound registration and ownership database for the municipal general valuation that follows. These deliverables include, but are not limited to:

  1. SG approved Cadastral (Property Register) spatial information as a polygon dataset;
  2. The Registered Cadastral spatial information as a polygon dataset;
  3. The Unregistered Cadastral spatial information as a polygon dataset;
  4. The SG approved Servitudes spatial information as a polygon dataset;
  5. The SG approved Servitudes spatial information as a polyline dataset;
  6. The SG approved Leases spatial dataset as a polygon dataset;
  7. Deeds Office attribute information for all registered properties in Database tables;
  8. Deeds Office attributes for Sectional Title complex units in Database tables;
  9. Quality assurance reports; 
  10. A signed declaration by the professional GISc practitioner;
  11. Project documentation including the implementation plan.