Members of the public were contacting the public works department daily to inform it about properties that belonged to the province, MEC Christian Martin said on Wednesday.
Replying to the debate on his department's annual report, Martin said in the Bisho legislature that of the 1,134 properties on the asset register, 889 had now been vested in the name of the Province of the Eastern Cape.
Martin said when it came to property "it is not as if we received a province in good state", adding that many of the problems flowed from the administration of the former Transkei.
The MEC said that the disposal of 85 properties was now at Cabinet level with only their valuation outstanding and once that was received, they would be sold.
He said the delay in selling State properties was why only R4,2-million had been generated in revenue, out of R17,7-million.
Earlier, Pine Pienaar (DA) pointed to the Auditor-General?s comment with regard to unauthorised expenditure.
Of R13,3-million "supposed to be spent on poverty alleviation programmes", R7,3-million had been absorbed in paying consultants and costs.
Pienaar said these programmes were "by their very nature not complex" and did not require the knowledge of specialised consultants.
"It was not necessary for consultants to come and eat up more than half of the money."
Pienaar said he wanted to know who the consultants were, why they were appointed and, if the A-G described the expenditure as "fruitless and wasteful", why steps were not being taken to get the money back?
Pienaar said that for the year ending March, 2005, those officially responsible for property management had not implemented the recommendations of a special report on leases, with the result that there were overpayments of R7,7-million.
"A further R7,6-million in losses were incurred during the last financial year because we continued to fail to implement those same recommendations.
"The pattern for this is set, and it?s simply alarming.
"We identify the problem. We pinpoint the solution and then we sit back and do nothing, with the result that we make the same mistakes over and over."
The report compiled by the portfolio committee on the department's annual report noted that the asset register had still not been completed.
In addition, other provincial government departments were leasing private properties while those owned by government were underutilised.