What should an agency do if the landlord never responds to the renewal enquiry?

Landlord silence is the most common cause of a missed renewal. The enquiry goes out, nothing comes back, and by the time anyone notices, the window in which the tenant had to be notified has closed.

The fix is to treat silence as an event with its own deadline. Re-Lease raises a landlord non-response fallback at 45 business days before the termination date — after the 60 business day enquiry, and still inside the 40-to-80 business day window that section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act sets for notifying the tenant.

At that point the agency has a decision to make on the mandate rather than on the lease: escalate to a second contact channel, apply whatever standing instruction the mandate gives for non-response, or record that the property will run on month-to-month terms. All three are defensible; drifting past the date without choosing is not.

Whichever route is taken, the enquiry, the reminders, the escalation and the eventual outcome should be recorded against the lease, because the question that gets asked later is always whether the landlord was asked in time.

Disclaimer: This is general information about South African lease-renewal procedure, not legal advice. Dates are calculated from the information you provide and from published public holidays. Check them against your lease and take your own legal advice before acting.