An approved contractor list in South Africa is a set of firms a client has checked once, against the public registers. Each job then goes to a contractor already cleared, instead of through a procurement exercise repeated per package. Who is building one this year is the more useful question. The answer is the public buyers on the tender board of 12 September 2026, and the landlords with empty offices to re-let.
Both are worth reading, because between them they show what a list is for.
The public side is building lists in the open
In the part of the eTenders board we read line by line on 12 September 2026, eighteen adverts were for a panel or a pre-approved list rather than for one job. The NHBRC alone advertised five-year panels of geotechnical engineers, civil engineers and underpinning and piling contractors, which closed on 14 and 15 September. Gauteng Roads and Transport advertised a three-year panel of civil contractors at 6CE to 9CE, closing 6 October. Gauteng Human Settlements advertised what it calls a pre-approved list of service providers, for protection and monitoring work rather than building, which closed on 18 September.
Sedibeng TVET College advertised a plumbing panel and an electrical panel, each for 36 months. The Joburg Market advertised a 36-month panel at grade 4 or higher across six classes of works. Maluti-A-Phofung's special economic zone advertised three, at grades 1 to 3, for three years. The Cape Town International Convention Centre advertised a plumbing maintenance panel.
None of those buyers is appointing a contractor. Each is appointing a list, once, so that for three or five years it does not have to run an open tender for every job. That is the logic of an approved list, and public buyers are using it widely.
The private side has a reason to, and it is 18.6%
Growthpoint's FY2026 results, reported by Property Wheel on 9 September, put its South African vacancy at 7.2%, the lowest since FY2019. The number that matters for a contractor list is the other one. About 70% of its 1 495 875m2 of office space is in Gauteng, and Gauteng office vacancy sits at 18.6%, up a fraction on the year. Longer-standing vacancies are concentrated in Midrand, Parktown and pockets of Sandton.
The renewal figure shows the other half of the work. Growthpoint's office renewal success rate rose to 78.3% from 57.5% a year earlier, with 198 225m2 renewed across 201 office leases. Every new letting of a floor that has sat empty, and many renewals, means a tenant installation, a refurbishment or a strip-out. Every one of those is a contractor appointment somebody has to make quickly and defend afterwards.
Growthpoint estimates its SA development pipeline at R2 billion to R3 billion a year for five years. Its results release, as reproduced by Business Explainer and confirmed independently by Business Day for offices, splits FY2027 like this.
| Growthpoint SA development, FY2027 | Amount |
|---|---|
| Logistics and industrial | R1.4 billion |
| Retail | R0.5 billion |
| Offices | R0.3 billion |
Property Wheel's version of that split prints the office figure as R3 billion, which would put the year at R4.9 billion and outside the estimate; the R0.3 billion is Growthpoint's number. Read it for what it says about a landlord with 18.6% of its Gauteng offices empty: the office money is going into re-letting what stands, not building more.
Down the road, Daily Investor reports that construction has started on Phase 3 of Barlow Park in Sandton, adding 406 residential units to the Atterbury and Divercity precinct, for completion by the end of 2027. No contractor is named, the report leans on an estate agent's commentary, and we found no second source for the phase yet, so it goes here only as a marker of where the work is.
What should a firm be checked against before it goes on the list?
A firm should be checked against the public registers before it goes on the list, because a list is only as good as the check that put it there. For a South African client there are five, and we have set out the five registers to check a contractor against separately.
- The cidb Register of Contractors, in the right class and grade.
- The list of contractors removed from that register.
- National Treasury's restricted suppliers database.
- The Register of Tender Defaulters.
- The directors behind the company, rather than the company alone.
Add a current COIDA letter of good standing and a tax compliance status that is clean on the day of the instruction, not only on the day of the application.
Then the thing every list forgets. Each of those checks is true on a date. A cidb grade lapses, a letter of good standing expires, a director moves to a restricted firm, and none of those events writes to the client that built the list. An approved list nobody re-checks is a list of firms that were approved once.
The contractor's side is the mirror of that. Getting on a list takes documents that depend on other documents, and staying on it takes those documents being current when the instruction arrives rather than when the application was lodged.
Arabella Infrastructure Solutions is a Johannesburg-based vetted contractor panel that is, in effect, an approved contractor list a client does not have to build or re-check. Every firm is checked against the registers before it sees a job, and stays on the panel on the strength of how the last one went. The checks follow our contractor vetting checklist, and the registers themselves are on our registers page. A landlord re-letting a Parktown floor sends one brief, and gets one quote already compared against the others. What that looks like is on the client page, and contractors who want to be on the list start on the contractor page.
On Monday
Take your current list of approved contractors, however informal, and write two dates beside each name: the date it was last checked against a register, and the date of its last instruction. A name with a check older than a year is not approved, it is remembered. A name with no instruction in two years is holding a slot a firm you actually need could fill.
Then pick the one floor or unit most likely to re-let this quarter and ask whether the firms you would call for it are on the list at all. If the answer is no, the list you keep is not the list you use.
