FICA compliance when selling a house in South Africa

FICA is the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001, South Africa's core anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing law. It does not regulate the sale itself. It puts duties on the professionals who handle the money, and a conveyancing attorney is one of them. The duty is to identify and verify a client, and the Financial Intelligence Centre's Public Compliance Communication 59 (PCC 59) refers to sections 21 and 21A of the Act for it. Section 21(1) ties it to the moment an institution engages with a prospective client to establish a business relationship or enter a single transaction, so it arises when the attorney takes you on and comes early, well before the transfer is lodged at the Deeds Office. In practice the attorney does it for both the seller and the buyer: MJ Kotze Inc's published list covers every natural person on the deed, buyer, seller or co-owner, and STBB's published process checks FICA compliance before lodgement.

See how conveyancing and the transfer process works for where this sits in the attorney's file. If you have not appointed one yet, browse conveyancing attorneys on Privately.

Be clear about what is law and what is habit. FICA sets the duty to identify and verify. Section 42(1), as substituted in 2022, requires each accountable institution to develop, document, maintain and implement its own risk management and compliance programme, and that programme sets the document list, as STBB's article explains, so items such as the tax number and the bank letter come from firm practice. Marriage papers do double duty, because they also tell the attorney who owns the house and who must sign. The table shows what firms usually ask an individual seller for. Ask yours for their list before you gather anything.

Your marriage decides who else the attorney checks and who signs. The usual position is in the table, but the attorney reads your papers and decides. One law firm's published list says couples married in community of property both have to be FICA'd, even where only one spouse is named in the offer to purchase. If you are selling while divorcing, or after a divorce, read selling a house during a divorce as well. If your spouse has died, selling an inherited house covers the estate side.

If the seller is a legal entity rather than a person, the attorney needs the entity's own registration and governance documents, plus identity documents for the people behind it. The idea behind the second part is beneficial ownership: the attorney wants to know which real people own or control the seller. The General Laws (Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing) Amendment Act 22 of 2022 amended the FIC Act, and PCC 59, issued by the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) on 8 August 2024, says those amendments commenced in December 2022 and changed the duties of accountable institutions, attorneys among them, on beneficial owners. The table follows PCC 59, alongside what one conveyancing firm's published list asks for.

Treat the table as the usual position, not a fixed list. Each firm sets its own thresholds under its risk programme, so your attorney's list may differ. CIPC runs a beneficial ownership filing: its page says all corporate entities registered with CIPC, except co-operatives, must file one, and companies and close corporations file it alongside their annual returns. That page states no percentage for who counts as a beneficial owner, so we take none from it. For how a company or trust compares with your own name, see owning property in your own name, a company or a trust.

Source-of-funds questions belong to the same duty to know who you are dealing with. Attorneys apply them according to risk, so they sharpen as the amount grows or the way of paying looks unusual. They are mostly put to the buyer, who is the one paying. A seller can be asked too, for example about how they came to own the house, so keep that paperwork to hand.

What is asked depends on where the money comes from. The table shows what firms commonly ask for, and one conveyancing firm's published list names bank statements, a sale agreement for another property, payslips and loan or donation papers. None of it is a judgement about you. Answer with documents rather than explanations, and answer promptly, because an attorney who cannot complete its checks cannot go ahead with the file (MJ Kotze Inc cites section 21E of the Act), and the FIC's guidance says an institution in that position must consider a suspicious and unusual transaction report under section 29 (PCC 59, paragraph 6.6).

There is also a fixed reporting rule. The FIC says accountable institutions must report "cash transactions of more than R49 999.99" (section 28, as the FIC's page gives it), which means R50 000 or more in cash. The rule is about cash, so ask your attorney how they would treat any cash in your deal.

There can be two FICA checks on one sale, and a private sale removes only one of them.

The conveyancer's check happens on every registered transfer. The FIC, in a statement the Law Society published on 18 July 2023, treats legal practitioners as accountable institutions under item 1 of Schedule 1 to the Act. A law firm's article makes the practical point: each institution must run its own risk-based checks and cannot substitute another's compliance for its own (STBB, 25 February 2025). So expect the attorney to run their own check, whatever an agent has already collected.

The agent's check applies only where an estate agent is involved. Estate agents are accountable institutions too, and PCC 56 places them under item 3 of Schedule 1. The Property Practitioners Act 22 of 2019 replaced the term "estate agent" with "property practitioner" from 1 February 2022, and PCC 56 says that anyone registered as an estate agent before February 2022, or performing an estate agent's activities since, is still an accountable institution under that item. PCC 56 is dated 14 November 2022, before the Schedule 1 changes that took effect on 19 December 2022, so the item number is as the FIC gave it then. An agent may ask for your ID and proof of address when you sign a mandate, before the house is listed. Ask the agent what they need.

Treat the two as separate. If you sell privately there is no agent's check, but the attorney's check is the same.

Selling without an agent does not change the attorney's check. It attaches to the attorney handling the transfer, so the same attorney asks the same buyer and seller for the same kind of documents before the file is lodged at the Deeds Office, whether you found your buyer by selling your house privately, through an agent, or through someone you already knew.

What does change is who coordinates it. An agent sometimes gathers FICA documents from both sides as part of a mandate. When you sell privately, that job sits with you and your buyer, working directly with the attorney. That is one more reason to have your documents ready before you accept an offer, alongside your compliance certificates.

Send FICA documents to the attorney, not to a buyer or to a stranger on WhatsApp. A copy of your ID and a proof of address can be misused, and the attorney has a legal reason to ask for them where a buyer does not. Get the attorney's contact details from their own website, or from a call you place, rather than from a message. Our guide on staying safe when you sell privately covers more.

Two questions often follow. Everything you need to sell a house covers the whole paperwork list, not only FICA. Whether you pay tax on the sale is a separate matter: the 2026 Budget announced a R3 000 000 primary residence exclusion, and our capital gains tax guide has the conditions and the dates.

On Privately you can save a draft listing first. The ID check comes when you publish, so a seller's identity is confirmed before a buyer sees a live listing. You can list your property and see how it works.

It does not replace the attorney's FICA check, and the attorney may still ask for a certified copy. What it can do is take the scramble out of the start. The Document Vault in your dashboard has places for an ID document and a proof of address, kept private, with an optional expiry date, so your copies are in one place when the attorney asks.

• 1. Start gathering documents when you list, not after you accept an offer. Do not wait for the conveyancer to ask, and ask them for their own list on day one.
• 2. Get certified copies close to when you will need them. A certification is usually only accepted as recent for a limited period, so certifying six months early often means doing it again.
• 3. If you are married in community of property, both spouses need to gather documents even if only one of you appears on the title deed.
• 4. Selling through a company, close corporation or trust? Ask the attorney for the entity list early, and check that your beneficial ownership information is up to date. Bringing it current from scratch can add time.
• 5. Request a fresh proof of address rather than reusing an old one. Accounts that arrive electronically, or sit in a spouse's name, are easy to overlook.
• 6. Answer source-of-funds questions with documents, not explanations. A conveyancer will usually want paperwork rather than a verbal assurance.
• 7. Send everything to the attorney, and only to the attorney. Not to a buyer, and not to a number you cannot verify.