Property reports for South African estate agents

A property's transfer history is the list of times it changed hands, as the deeds office registered them. Each report sets out every registered transfer, one line each, with the price, the sale date, the registration date, the sellers and the buyers.

The two dates are two different events. The sale date is when the property was bought, and the registration date is when the deeds office registered the transfer to the buyer. Lines run newest first, dated by the sale where the record has one and by the registration where it does not.

Where the record has a gap, the report leaves it as a gap rather than filling it. A missing price prints as "Not on record", a missing registration date reads "Registration date not on record", and a sale date the record lacks is left off the line. If the record names a buyer but no seller, the line reads "Seller not on record" (and the other way round), and a property with no registered transfers says "No transfers on record".

Where a bond was registered with the transfer, the line carries the bond number, the amount and the institution behind it. Where the record has one, the line also carries the document number of the deed the transfer was registered under.

Names are printed exactly as the deeds office wrote them. A person can appear surname first, and a company, a trust or a deceased estate appears under its registered name, because rearranging them would mean guessing which words are a name.

For an agent, the transfer history answers the first questions about a listing: what the owner paid, when they bought, and how often the property has changed hands. Read it beside the 15 nearby registered sales in the same report. That is property price history the way South Africa's deeds office keeps it: what buyers paid, not what sellers asked.

It is the deeds office record, not a valuation. It tells you what happened to the property and leaves the price it should fetch today to you.

To read the record for one property, search the deeds office record for one property. For every route to a title deed, the deeds office's own included, read How to check a title deed online in South Africa, with the routes compared.

Search starts on the map. Type an address, watch the pin land, and drag it if Google put it on the wrong side of the road. The deeds search follows the marker.

Saved properties draw their surveyed parcel outline, taken from the national cadastre rather than a circle drawn around the pin. Satellite view is one click away when you need to see the roof and the yard. Sectional title schemes get their own search, because a street address inside a complex returns every unit in the building and you have to pick yours.

The grey price tags scattered around your properties are nearby sales out of the firm's own reports, drawn once that layer is switched on.

Paste your colleagues' email addresses into one field. Each becomes a chip you can pull back out, each gets its own role before you send, and you can add a message.

Before you can send, the form works out what those invitations do to your member count and tells you where they leave you against your cap. Sending costs nothing. We count a seat on acceptance, not on send, and an invitation only binds to the Google account carrying the address you sent it to. Anything still outstanding can be resent or revoked from the member list.

Every credit spent records which member spent it. Admins and Billing get usage broken down by person, so the end of the month produces an answer rather than a total.