Nobody knows how many estate agents South Africa has. Not even the regulator

South Africa has no official, current count of its own estate agents, and the regulator that licenses them says so itself:

"Lack of a comprehensive database of all" property practitioners.

That line sits in the PPRA's Annual Performance Plan for 2025/26, filed under the authority's own weaknesses. Nobody forced the admission. The regulator wrote it about itself, in its own plan for the year ahead.

What the PPRA actually publishes

Each year the PPRA's annual report tables the Fidelity Fund Certificates and Registration Certificates issued during that financial year. What no recent report publishes is a standing register: a live count of certificates currently valid, held by practitioners working today. The two sound similar. The gap between them is the whole story.

It gets murkier. The FY2024/25 annual report includes tables headed "Number of active property practitioners... as at 31 March 2025." Add those tables up and they sum to exactly 8,822, the precise figure for certificates issued that financial year. A table labelled as a snapshot of who is active turns out, on inspection, to be that year's issuance count relabelled: a flow of paperwork wearing a register's name tag.

Why the count keeps moving under its own feet

Until FY2022/23, FFCs renewed annually, so a year's issuance was a fair proxy for the active market. From FY2023/24, certificates moved to a three-year validity cycle. Total issuance fell from 46,866 in FY2022/23 to 17,473 the next year, then to 8,822. The PPRA attributes the fall to the new three-year cycle and, separately, to ICT system failures during FY2024/25, rather than to agents leaving the industry. Underlying new registrations, arguably the closest thing to a genuine growth signal in this data, held fairly steady across the same period: 6,458, then 7,275, then 5,858.

The practical effect: annual issuance, the only figure the PPRA publishes regularly, stopped meaning what it used to mean the moment the renewal cycle changed. Nobody has published a replacement metric since.

What the regulator says out loud

Briefing Parliament's Human Settlements committee in October 2025 on the FY2024/25 annual report, a PPRA executive described the authority's operating environment as covering "over 40,000 practitioners". That is a verbal, order-of-magnitude figure offered to Parliament, not a formally published or audited register total, though it squares broadly with the last clean issuance year (40,664 individual practitioners, FY2022/23). At best it is the regulator's own working estimate of its own regulated population.

Both recent annual reports also carry qualified audit opinions from the Auditor-General, and both contain small internal inconsistencies of their own, a firm count reported as 6,201 in one table and 6,202 in another, for instance. None of that is scandalous. It is a plain reason to treat every version of "how many estate agents are there", including the 40,664 and 6,202 figures used elsewhere on this blog, as the best available estimate rather than an audited fact.

The listed giants can't tell you either

The gap runs past the regulator. Two of the largest brands operating in South Africa, RE/MAX and eXp, are franchises of US-listed companies, RE/MAX Holdings and eXp World Holdings respectively. Search both companies' SEC filings for South African or Southern African agent counts and you find nothing. Neither discloses per-country agent numbers in its regulatory filings, so every South African agent count attributed to either brand, however often it gets repeated, traces back to the company's own press announcement.

So the blind spot runs the full length of the industry: no current standing register from the regulator, no independent verification from the exchanges where the two biggest international franchisors are listed, and no third-party count that is not itself built on a web scrape of publicly discoverable business addresses.

Why flying blind matters

An industry body cannot advocate effectively for a workforce it cannot size. A regulator that does not know the shape of its own population struggles to resource enforcement, complaints handling or continuing education. And anyone planning for this market, whether a software vendor, a franchisor or a policymaker, is working from certificate-issuance flows and brand press releases rather than a count that would survive scrutiny. The PPRA's own performance plan names the gap as a weakness. Take the admission at face value instead of assuming someone, somewhere, has the real number.

findproperly cannot fix the regulator's register, and we are not guessing at the shape of the industry either. Our underlying data comes straight from the deeds registry and refreshes continuously, so the property side of the equation, who owns what and what it last sold for, does not depend on an annual paperwork cycle to stay current.