South African addresses have several functions including a means of physically locating a property or a building; for FICA and Know Your Customer compliance; as parameters in statistics collection and marketing segmentation, to name a few [1].  Addresses are still the most widely accepted representation of a location and essential data elements to an address are accurate suburbs and respective postal codes.

We note on that on average there are approximately 50 changes every month to the South African suburb-postcode table file, of approximately 16 000 records, which includes both street and box related postcodes. Of these changes, approximately 80% are new suburb additions and on average there are four suburbs per postcode, with a maximum of 210.

With an average number of streets per suburb of 30, these 50 changes per month to the suburb-postcode file, potentially affects up to 1 500 streets per month (including box addresses). The potential number of actual delivery points affected is within the range of 3-10 times this number (4 500 – 15 000), not taking into consideration multi-unit complexes or buildings with multiple letterboxes which would significantly increase this number [2].

SA postcode and suburb data were collected from several publically-available lookup websites as common sources for these data.  The total number of records and accuracy of these data were then compared to IDATA’s SA Suburb & Postal Code tables.  IDATA’s tables are the most current and accurate in the country as they are actively researched in conjunction with our client companies, municipalities, property developers, estate agents, and the South African Post Office (SAPO) on an ongoing basis.

The results varied considerably (see table below) and showed that on average, for websites audited, these sources were 33% and 47% incomplete due to missing box and street data, respectively. In addition to this, the accuracy of the data was also found to vary considerably, sometimes as low as 11% when compared to IDATA’s SA Suburb & Postal Code tables.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the considerable amount of changes per month to the suburb-postcode file, IDATA can help you contact your customers at their correct addresses, saving you time and money while ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Do not delay and contact IDATA to assess the quality of your customer address data today.

 

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)

2. https://www.idata-it.co.za/street-renaming-in-sa-and-why-its-not-small-pocket-change-part-2/

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