Property practitioner in ZA
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
The one register in the index whose whole purpose is the money. No one may act as a property practitioner without a valid fidelity fund certificate, and a practitioner without one has no right to commission and may have to repay what they took. Verification is a search by name, by a seven-digit reference or by firm number, and the certificate itself must be produced on request. What makes it worth reading is the authority’s own consumer advisory: check the practitioner is registered, check the firm is registered, check the firm has an active trust account at a registered South African bank, and check the money is going into that trust account and not a private one. The regulator can confirm the first three. The fourth, which is the one the fraud turns on, it cannot confirm at all.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Yes | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | No | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Give every licence a stable address
The register exists but lives behind a search form, so there is nothing to link to, nothing to archive and nothing to attest against. A permanent address per licence costs little and moves this row to grade C on its own.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.