A quote for common property work in a sectional title scheme has to survive a room. The trustee who asked for it is not the person paying for it. The owners who are paying were not on site when the work was measured, and most of them will read the document once, quickly, on a phone.
That is the approval problem in a body corporate, and it is why good contractors lose work to worse ones. The winning quote is often not the better job. It is the one that could be explained by a trustee to a room of owners without the trustee having to guess.
Who is actually in the room
The ownership base has moved, and sectional title is where it moved most. Lightstone data reported this week shows that for every 100 male sectional title owners in 2025 there were 130 female owners. In estates the ratio was 112 to 100. Freehold was near parity at 103 to 100.
Single women bought 42 323 properties across South Africa's five largest metros, which is where 60% of all their buying happened. The City of Johannesburg, the City of Tshwane and Ekurhuleni accounted for 66% of that. Average purchase prices ran from R1,8 million in Cape Town down through R1,3 million in Johannesburg, R1,2 million in eThekwini and Tshwane, and R1 million in Ekurhuleni. Buying was strongest among women aged 35 to 55, who bought about 34 200 properties, against 21 400 by women under 35 and 14 100 by women over 55.
None of that tells you who chairs your trustee meeting. It does tell you that one assumption behind a lot of quoting has been wrong for a while. The decision maker is not a man in his fifties who owns a freehold house.
Where the two data sets disagree
Worth separating, because they are counting different things and they are not the same people counting. The Lightstone figures above count owners and purchases in 2025. A separate analysis by AfriGIS, the geospatial data firm, of more than 10 million deeds transfers going back to 1995, reported by Bizcommunity and led by Liza Nolte, tracks something else. It puts the share of home purchases made by women only at about 29,5% in 1995 and roughly 38% today, passing men-only purchases around 2016.
Owners per hundred and share of purchases are not the same measure, and two independent firms reading two different data sets is a strength rather than a muddle. Both point the same way. Neither should be quoted as the other.
What the standard quote assumes
The document most contractors send is built for a homeowner who is standing in the building, has already agreed the problem, and can say yes on the spot. In a scheme, none of those three things is true.
The trustee has to carry the quote to people who never saw the defect. So the quote has to do the seeing for them.
What to insist on before it goes to a meeting
Send the quote back if it is missing any of these. The request costs you a day and saves an argument that costs a month.
- The scope split between common property and any section. A quote that does not say which is which cannot be paid from the right account, and the argument about who pays starts after the scaffolding is up.
- Measured quantities with rates, not a lump sum. A lump sum can only be compared to another lump sum, and owners will compare it to the cheapest one they can find.
- What is excluded, in writing. Unstated exclusions become claims, and a claim mid job is the thing that turns a maintenance decision into a dispute.
- Access, hours and disruption. Which units lose parking, which lose water, on which days. This is the part owners actually vote on, whatever the price says.
- A programme with dates, and what happens to the price if the scheme delays the start past them.
Three quotes for the same job are only comparable if all three carry those five items. Most panels of three do not, which is why so many schemes end up choosing on the total at the bottom of page one.
The gap this leaves
The person taking the call at a body corporate is usually a trustee doing an unpaid job in the evenings, or a managing agent running dozens of schemes at once. Neither has time to interrogate a contractor's grading, insurance or track record before circulating a quote to owners.
Arabella verifies the contractor before that call happens, so a trustee is choosing between firms that have already been checked rather than between three documents of unequal honesty. What that covers is set out on the client page, and the rest of this week's property and compliance reading sits in insights.
Before the next meeting
Take the last quote your scheme approved and mark it against the five items above. Most will fail on two of them, and the two are usually exclusions and access.
Then write those five items into the request you send out next time, before any contractor prices anything. A scheme that asks for the same five things from every bidder gets three comparable numbers, and comparable numbers are the only thing that makes a maintenance vote quick.
