Client set to fight bank to get repossessed home back

A man whose home was repossessed by a bank has vowed to go to court in an effort to have it returned to him.

Abram Kgeletsane told The Citizen he and his wife had bought their first home in Kagiso on the West Rand in July of 2008.

In September of that year, the world economy began crashing around bad real estate investment decisions and although comparatively untouched, South Africa wasn’t immune to that.

Unwittingly, Kgeletsane probably could not have picked a worse time to buy his home. “In 2009 my wife lost her job, so I began having problems with payments,” Kgeletsane said.

He said he approached Nedbank to inform them that he was struggling with bond repayments and came to a payment agreement of R2 500 from the R4 600 he had been paying. And according to him, everything was fine.

This was until the morning of July 1, 2013, when “a convoy of police officers and a guy claiming to be from the office of the sherif arrived and they brought with them the new occupants of the same house I was living in”.

Kgeletsane said he wasn’t given a chance to ask what was happening.

“I was chased out of the house like a most wanted criminal, humiliated and disgraced in front of my wife, children and neighbours. My furniture, clothes, and other belongings were thrown out into the street,” he wrote in a letter to Nedbank’s dispute resolution unit in October, 2016.

He said he was still waiting for a reply.

Nedbank spokesperson Tshegofatso Selahle said Kgeletsane had been “short-paying on monthly instalments from inception. The pattern escalated to missed instalments over time. The payments were made in cash”.

Selahle said the bank received correspondence from Kgeletsane’s debt counsellor in November 2010 to conclude a payment arrangement, but the bond had already been foreclosed on.

When exactly this happened Selahle didn’t say, but it would have been between 2009 and 2010, which meant Kgeletsane had his home for scant months.

The Citizen had asked Selahle numerous times for confirmatory paperwork, which she has ignored.

She said the Kgeletsanes had broken “numerous” agreements so the property was taken to a sheriff’s auction and it was bought by the bank, after which it was sold to a third-party buyer called Udumo Trading.

Kgeletsane said he had bought the house in 2008 for R320 000; Udomo sold it for R280 000. Selahle didn’t say how much Nedbank had bought the house for.

In May, GroundUp reported “thousands of homes have been repossessed by the banks without ever having their claims tested by a judge” over the past 20 years.

Kgeletsane has promised Nedbank a fight.

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