If you have lost your title deed, or your bank is holding the original against a bond, you can order a copy from the Deeds Office without visiting one and without appointing an attorney. We retrieve it from the registry that holds the property and email it to you.
A title deed — registered as a Deed of Transfer at the Deeds Office — is the document that records who owns a property, how it was acquired, what it was bought for, and any conditions registered against it. The Deeds Office keeps the definitive record; the paper copy you may have at home is only a copy of that record.
The copy we supply is issued under Section 66 of the Deeds Registries Act. It is a full, legible reproduction of the registered deed, marked for information purposes, and it carries every clause the original does — including the restrictive conditions, servitudes and title conditions that matter when you are planning building work.
A Section 66 information copy cannot be used to transfer the property. Transfer is done by a conveyancing attorney working from the Deeds Office record itself, and if the original deed has been lost, replacing it is an application under Section 68 of the Deeds Registries Act — a formal court-free but attorney-driven process to have a replacement registered. If that is what you need, order this copy anyway: your conveyancer will want the deed number and the property details it contains before they start.
If you need a copy that is stamped and certified by the Deeds Office rather than marked for information, order a certified title deed copy instead.
The more precisely the property is identified, the faster the search. Any one of these is usually enough:
If you are not sure which property is registered at the address you have, run a property search first, or pin the property on our property search map. The fee for an instant search is deducted from a document copy ordered afterwards.
We search all eleven South African Deeds Offices — Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Pietermaritzburg, Vryburg, King William’s Town, Umtata, Kimberley and Bloemfontein — and you do not need to know which one holds the property. The copy is emailed to you as a PDF.
Deeds registered in the last few decades are held digitally and come back quickly. Older deeds are held on microfilm and have to be retrieved and scanned, which is why the turnaround is stated as a range rather than a single day.
No. The Deeds Office charges a prescribed fee to retrieve and produce a copy of a registered deed, and our fee covers that plus the search and the retrieval. What is free is finding out whether a deed exists and which office holds it — that is what a property search establishes before you order the copy.
For everything except transferring the property, yes. Municipalities, insurers, banks and body corporates accept a Section 66 information copy. To transfer a property whose original deed is lost, a replacement deed must be registered under Section 68 of the Deeds Registries Act, which a conveyancing attorney handles. The copy you order here gives that attorney the deed number and property description they need to start.
Between one and ten working days. Recent deeds are held digitally and usually come back within a day or two. Older deeds have to be retrieved from microfilm at the Deeds Office and scanned, which takes longer, and some registries are slower than others. The exact turnaround is shown in the order panel above.
