The New Cold-Calling Rules: What Every Estate Agency Principal Needs to Know

If you run an estate agency in South Africa, the way you reach potential buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants changed on 15 April 2026 - and the change is bigger than most principals realise. The Consumer Protection Act has been amended to introduce a national "Do Not Contact" register, and the new regime applies immediately. There is no grace period, no soft launch, and no exemption for small agencies.

This article is a plain-English walkthrough of what the new rules mean for your business, what you can and can't do from today, and the five things you should be doing this month to get ahead of the compliance curve. It is not a substitute for tailored legal advice, but it should give you a clear sense of where the risk now sits.

What actually changed

At the heart of the new regime is a national opt-out list run by the National Consumer Commission (NCC). Any consumer in South Africa can now register their phone number, email address and physical address on this list - by USSD, WhatsApp, the NCC website, or in person at any post office. Once a consumer has registered, they are protected from direct marketing across every channel: calls, SMS, email and WhatsApp.

Every agency that markets directly to consumers must now register with the NCC. The initial fee is R2 574, with an annual renewal of R1 930.50. Registration is not optional - it is the price of being allowed to make a single marketing call.

Once registered, the agency takes on an ongoing obligation: at least once a month, you must check your contact database against the national opt-out list and scrub anyone who has opted out. The cost is 12c per record. If a number is on the list, you may not contact it - and it does not matter how you got the number. A board call-in from 2019, a CMA request from a referral, a cell number scribbled on the back of a business card at a show day: if that person has opted out, your file is closed.

What you can still do, and what you can't

The new rules do not stop estate agencies from marketing. They reshape how you can market. The table below summarises the key dos and don'ts at a glance; the prose that follows fills in the nuance.

✓ YOU CAN STILL

✗ YOU CANNOT

Contact your existing buyers, sellers and landlords on your own database - they have an existing relationship with the agency.

Cold-call or SMS people whose numbers you bought, scraped, or got from a third-party lead list.

Respond to enquiries from a Property24, Private Property or Facebook lead - they contacted you first.

Phone or message anyone who has registered a pre-emptive block on the National Opt-Out Registry.

Door-knock and hand out flyers in the street - the rules cover electronic communication.

Send marketing without identifying yourself and the agency in every message.

Market to your past clients (people you've previously transacted with) for similar services, with an opt-out in every message.

Outsource cold-calling to a call centre and assume the agency is off the hook - you are still legally responsible.

You can still contact your existing buyers, sellers and landlords on your own database - those people have an existing relationship with the agency, and that relationship is protected. You can respond to enquiries that come in through Property24, Private Property or a Facebook lead form, because in those cases the consumer contacted you first. You can market to past clients for similar services, provided every message contains a clear opt-out. And, crucially, the rules cover electronic communication — you can still door-knock a neighbourhood and hand out flyers in the street.

What you cannot do is cold-call or SMS people whose numbers you bought, scraped from a website, or got from a third-party lead list. You cannot phone or message anyone who has registered a pre-emptive block on the National Opt-Out Registry, regardless of how friendly the relationship feels. You cannot send marketing without identifying both yourself and the agency in every message. And you cannot outsource the problem - if you contract a call centre to do your cold-calling, the agency remains legally responsible for what those operators say and who they call.

A reminder on timing, which is an existing CPA rule but bears repeating because it is now enforced more aggressively: marketing contact is permitted on weekdays between 08:00 and 20:00, and on Saturdays between 09:00 and 13:00 only. No marketing contact is permitted on Sundays or public holidays.

Why this matters: two regulators, real fines

The reason to take the new regime seriously is not the registration fee. It is that an agency that breaks these rules now faces two regulators at once.

The NCC, acting under the Consumer Protection Act, can impose fines of up to R1 million, or 10% of your annual turnover - whichever is higher. The Information Regulator, acting under POPIA, can impose fines of up to R10 million for marketing without proper consent. The same conduct - for example, an agent SMSing a list of cell numbers from a leaked database - can attract penalties from both regulators on different legal grounds. And ignoring an NCC compliance notice is a criminal offence carrying a sentence of up to 12 months in prison.

For a mid-sized agency, a single sloppy SMS campaign can comfortably end up costing more than a year's commission.

Five things to do this month

There is no need to panic, but there is a need to act. Five steps will put your agency on the right side of the new regime.

First, stop buying or trading lead lists. Whatever value those lists once had, they are now a direct compliance liability. The cheapest scrubbing in the world will not save you from a list whose provenance you cannot explain.

Second, brief your agents. The rule they need to remember is simple: no calls or SMS to people who have not opted in or who are not past clients of the agency. If an agent is unsure, the answer is no.

Third, add an identification line to every marketing SMS, email and WhatsApp. Something as plain as "This is [Agent Name] from [Agency], you can opt out by replying STOP" is enough - and it is non-negotiable.

Fourth, diarise NCC registration for July 2026, when the portal opens. Don't leave it to the last week.

Fifth, update your CRM so that every contact record shows two things: where the contact came from, and whether they consented to being marketed to. If you cannot answer those two questions for a record, you should not be contacting that person.

How Van Deventer Dowlath & Marx Incorporated (VDM) can help

Van Deventer Dowlath & Marx advises estate agencies on practical compliance with the new Regulations, POPIA and the Property Practitioners Act. We can review your call scripts, audit your CRM workflows, train your agents, and revisit your operator agreements with marketing vendors and call centres. If the NCC or the Information Regulator comes knocking, we can respond on your behalf.

If you would like a compliance review of your agency's marketing operations, get in touch with Cor van Deventer at our Johannesburg office.