- Owners and occupiers can park in Exclusive Use Areas if registered in the Deeds Office, and such rights are legally enforceable.
- Parking on common property without prior written consent from trustees is prohibited and can lead to intervention from the Community Schemes Ombud Service or the High Court.
- Repeated or careless parking on common property disrupts other residents and can lead to restrictions or fines.
Parking, irrespective of where, always becomes a matter of contention. Be it in a mall, at the beach, or on the street, parking can be a nightmare. Sectional title schemes are no exception to this longstanding issue.
Owners, occupiers, and their visitors can legally park within designated Exclusive Use Areas in a scheme (such as bays or gardens), provided they hold the exclusive use right to the Exclusive Use Area in terms of the scheme’s rules registered in the Deeds Office.
Subsection 10(7) of the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act 8 of 2011 allows a scheme’s body corporate to create management or conduct rules that establish and confer exclusive use rights to certain section owners.
Such exclusive use rights must have a corresponding plan clearly demarcating each Exclusive Use Area, a schedule of allocation of each area to a section owner, as well as the purpose for which each Exclusive Use Area may be used, in terms of Subsection 10(8) of the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act 8 of 2011.
In this circumstance, a scheme’s body corporate may create rules that allocate bays or garden areas to particular section owners for their and their visitors’ parking. This constitutes a legally enforceable exclusive use right, provided that it is registered in the Deeds Office.
If a parking bay is not registered in the Deeds Office, it is not recognised as an Exclusive Use Area under statutory law and can result in an adverse High Court order, as was the case in The Body Corporate of the Primavera Sectional Title Scheme v Michael Adrian Patric Godby.
Illegally parking on common property
Prescribed Conduct Rule 3(1) of the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Regulations 2016 states that an owner, occupier, or their visitor cannot park on the common property of a scheme without prior written consent from the scheme’s trustees, which must specify the duration that any parking is allowed.
This is further reinforced by Prescribed Conduct Rule 6(3), which prohibits owners, occupiers, and their visitors from obstructing a scheme’s common property, including through the use of vehicles.
However, some individuals defy a scheme’s rules and obstructively park on common property to the detriment of other owners and occupiers. In these cases, aggrieved owners and occupiers can approach the Community Schemes Ombud Service under Section 39(2)(a) of the Community Schemes Ombud Service Act 9 of 2011 to have the offending individual restrained from parking irresponsibly or obstructing access.
Alternatively, if the conduct is frequent, aggrieved owners and occupiers can approach the High Court for interdictory relief.
This demonstrates that something as simple as parking, if done carelessly and repeatedly on the common property of a scheme, can result in a court or adjudication order restricting that type of behaviour altogether.
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3 Comments
There was this bored guy in my complex years ago going around marking the driveways with rectangles in chalk and saying they’re his bays. He was off his head. Thankfully he got kicked out of the complex.
What I will never understand is how some people buy in estates and then want to have like 100 people as visitors AT THE SAME TIME. There is no parking space in estates. If you wanted to party all the time why not buy a standalone??
My neighbour is an old man who keeps parking across the accessway in my complex and jamming it. He thinks he owns the whole thing when other owners need to use it to get to their units. My husband just bought a towing bakkie with a bullbar. Let us see how my neighbour tries to park now!