UNFAIR TREATMENT REGARDING LEVIES AND MALADMINISTRATION

I am a resident Zambezi Manor Lifestyle Estates in Pretoria which is managed by CSI, my problem is when I bought the property was deployed by my department to work abroad and after the stand was approved I gave them my account numbers to debit my account for the levies which they did for some time. When we started building, we were requested to pay an amount of R10,000.00 as building insurance incase there is an injury on site, if we finish building without any incidents occurring on site we will get a refund of R7,000 from the money paid.

We finished building without any incidents and moved in the house last year February, after coming back December 2019 from abroad. We went to the Estate manager to inform him that we finished building and requested the refund and we were given a form to fill and submit back, days later we got our R7,000 refund.

In March I received a call from CSI that I owe levies R8,000 and asked how come because I from my knowledge they supposed to be debiting my account for the levies and was told that they were debiting the money which was debited for the building insurance for the levies. I asked why and never got the answer.

We went to the Estate Manager to ask him questions trying to understand what exactly happened to end up owing that much money when CSI is supposed to be debiting my account. He explained that some of the residents they normally don't take the refund and request that the money be paid into the levies' account.

We made an arrangement to add extra R200 during that time and will pay the rest later as we were going through financial problems. The next thing we got was a call from their lawyer, no warning letter nor indication. After a long argument with the lawyers we ended up making an arrangement to pay R1,800 starting end of August with an agreement that we will pay the balance in March 2021.

End of February 2021, the lawyers called me and requested that we pay the money and told them that I said March and it will be around the 15th but before we now it a RED letter was delivered at our house stating that we owe R9,363 and our access will be blocked.

We started again to try to get the answers and explained to them that it was their fault for us to be owing that much money, and how come that the money keeps on increasing not decreasing. the next thing they told us that we were supposed to inform them that the R10,000 was for the building insurance not levies....... for me that was a lame excuse because they are the ones who make the rules and they can't come again and want us to explain to them their rules.

My problem is for them to take us to the lawyers without warning us and not wanting to take responsibility.

Currently our Estate is a mass, we have a boom gate that have not been working for more than a month now and the street lights are also not working. They don't communicate with the residents and also not respond to our concerns.

These people just want to make money out of us residents but they don't deliver.

I just want to warn all people who are living within the properties managed by CSI, including mine to be careful.