The day the Competition Commission came for the property portals

In 2023, South Africa's Competition Commission wrapped up a market inquiry into online property portals and found that Property24 and Private Property were both charging agencies rate-card prices that differed by more than 300% between comparable tiers, with no cost basis to justify the gap. It ordered an end to multi-year lock-in contracts with large agency groups, scrapped a shared R500-a-month interoperability fee all three major players had been charging, and mandated capped, cost-anchored pricing packages for small agencies. Three years on, those remedies are the compliance baseline for every portal in this market.

What the inquiry found

The Commission's Online Intermediation Platforms Market Inquiry examined how Property24 and Private Property priced their agency subscriptions. Both portals set rates by listing volume at group and office level, and the inquiry found tier-to-tier differentials exceeding 300% that neither portal could show were tied to any underlying cost difference. In plain terms: two agencies of meaningfully similar size, in similar markets, could pay wildly different rates depending on which tier they had been placed in or how their contract had been negotiated, with no transparent cost logic behind the gap.

The inquiry also found all three major players, Property24, Private Property and Prop Data, charging agencies roughly R500 a month simply to let their own listings feed out to other platforms. An interoperability fee, in effect a tax on agencies that wanted their stock visible in more than one place.

What changed as a result

The small-agency packages are the remedy with the clearest fingerprint in today's market. Property24's 2026 rate card carries them as standard line items: SIBP at R656 a month for agencies under a defined listing threshold, and SIRP at R247 a month for small rental books. Both lines exist because a regulator required a floor.

Rebosa, the industry body that had historically positioned Private Property as the sector's preferred portal, was separately instructed to stop, on the basis that steering members toward one commercial platform sat awkwardly alongside the pricing conduct the inquiry had just found.

The small-agency remedies also came with an actual formula rather than a vague instruction to be fairer. SIBP-eligible agencies (below a defined monthly lead or listing threshold) had to be priced within a set band of the weighted average per-lead price charged to all other business users, a band tightened over time from 15% to 10%. SIRP-eligible small rental books were capped at no more than 15% above the weighted average cost per listing. New historically disadvantaged agents became entitled to twelve months of free subscription. That level of specificity is unusual for a competition remedy, and it is why the packages show up as fixed lines on the rate card rather than as discretionary discounts a portal could quietly walk back.

Why this matters beyond the two named portals

The easy reading is two companies getting a regulatory slap. The useful reading is structural. The Commission had no quarrel with volume-based pricing as such, since tiering by lead volume or listing count is a reasonable way to price a service that scales with usage. What it objected to was the absence of a visible, defensible cost basis behind the size of the gaps between tiers, plus contract terms (multi-year lock-ins, blanket interoperability fees) that made it hard for agencies to leave or to trade freely across platforms.

That is a standard, not a one-off penalty. Any business pricing South African agencies by volume now operates in the shadow of a regulator that has already ruled on exactly this pattern. A published, cost-justified rate card with a genuine small-agency floor is the baseline a regulator has shown it will enforce.

The findproperly angle

We are building against that standard from day one rather than retrofitting it later. One published rate card, the same prices for every agency regardless of size, no negotiated tiers, no lock-in contracts. The industry's own regulator has already said what good portal pricing looks like, and we see no reason to build anything else.