Notices of sale in execution are published in the national Government Gazette. Provincial gazettes carry provincial business, which is proclamations, provincial notices and local government matters, and they do not carry these sale notices.
That distinction quietly costs people properties. Somebody whose interest is a house in KwaZulu-Natal reasonably starts with the KwaZulu-Natal provincial gazette, finds no sale notices in it, and concludes nothing is coming up in their area. They are not looking at a quiet market. They are reading the wrong publication.
The mistake is an easy one to make. Provincial gazettes are real, they publish on a schedule, and they carry a great deal about the province. Sales in execution are simply not among the things they carry. Nothing announces that; you infer it from an absence, and an absence is exactly what a thin market looks like too.
So the first question to settle is not where the property is. It is which publication you are reading. A property in Nelspruit and a property in Paarl are advertised in the same national gazette, in the same section, in the same week.
The second thing worth knowing is that the notice is written for the record rather than for a buyer. It identifies the property by erf number and township, states the sheriff conducting the sale, gives the date and place, names the attorney acting for the creditor, and states the reserve where a court has fixed one. It does not tell you whether the house is worth buying. It tells you that it is being sold, and who to ask.
That is most of what RepoLens does that is not glamorous. We read the national gazette as it publishes, pull the sale notices out of it, and structure them by property, area, date, sheriff and reserve, so that watching an area is something you can do without reading a legal publication every week.
Watching one area is free. If you want to know what a week actually looks like in your province, that is the cheapest way to find out.
Finding the notice is the beginning rather than the end. Which kind of sale you are at, what a reserve does and does not mean, the costs that land on top of the bid, the arrear rates and levies that follow the property rather than the previous owner, and what evicting an occupant really costs are all in the buyer's guide.