What a property report costs in South Africa in 2026: R48 to R235, and what you actually get

Type an address into Google and a property report is one of the first paid things offered back to you. The prices sitting behind that offer, for the same basic question, who owns this and what did it last sell for, run from R48 to R235 depending which page you land on. We priced nine of them against our own report at R99 to see what the spread actually buys.

What one report costs today

Five sites sell what's essentially the same bare deeds extract: MyDeedSearch, DEEDSOnline and eDEEDS at R235, DeedsOffice.Online and DeedsCheck at R230. Property24's Property Report is R118. findproperly charges R99, and the two reports aren't the same thing. propertyai.co.za asks R150. TPN is the cheapest at R48, and Lightstone's once-off Seller or Buyer Value Report is R201,25 including VAT.

How fast, and what it takes to get one

"Instant" gets used loosely. Four of the five deeds shops say a report lands in minutes; MyDeedSearch's own FAQ says one working day, on the same page that calls the product instant. DeedsOffice.Online is upfront about the working day, no contradiction there. None of them shows anything on screen. Every one is a PDF to an inbox, which is fine until nothing arrives.

Two of the five want an account before they'll run a search at all. DEEDSOnline's FAQ states plainly that a search "requires a verified user account and ID number for POPIA compliance." eDEEDS's terms require an account as well. VerifyNow's search doesn't take an address in the first place. It wants a South African ID number you already have the right to use, plus a lawful reason for asking, and returns a report either way, R29,90 at its cheapest tier.

What happens when the deeds office has nothing is where the real difference sits. MyDeedSearch's FAQ calls a "not found" result a successfully completed search, and charges for it. DeedsOffice.Online does the same, on the reasoning that a "no results" answer is itself information. DeedsCheck is the one outlier that refunds automatically when the registry has no record for the address searched.

What's actually in it

The five deeds shops sell the same short list: registered owner, purchase price and date, deed number, bonds, endorsements, transfer history. None of their pages mentions a comparable sale, and only DeedsCheck adds a map. Sample PDFs from DEEDSOnline and DeedsCheck confirm it field by field: a data table with the owner's ID number masked, no street address on DEEDSOnline's, and bond amounts shown as "NIL" where there's nothing to report.

Property24, propertyai.co.za, TPN and Lightstone all add an automated valuation and nearby sales on top of the bare extract, which is closer to what findproperly's report does. Two of those samples are worth flagging by date. Property24's published sample is dated 24 April 2023, and TPN's June 2026 sample shows comparable sales that stop in October 2023. Neither tells you how current the live product is.

findproperly's report carries the owner, every transfer with its price and date, bonds and the institutions behind them, endorsements, and 15 nearby registered sales with price, date, size and distance, plotted on a map. It does not carry an automated valuation, and it does not ask for an ID number. What it does ask is an email address, and the report is fetched from the deeds office when you buy it, not from a cache.

The wholesale layer underneath

Deeds-office data is also sold wholesale, by Lexis WinDeed and Lightstone, mostly to conveyancers, banks and agencies. A private individual can register with WinDeed directly, with banking details on file and a debit order or a prepaid voucher, and pull raw searches at a lower rate per search. What you get is the record, not a report: no map, no nearby sales, and nothing on screen the moment you ask. That is the trade every shop on this page is charging for.

How this compares abroad

The UK's official copy of the title register is £7, about R152. Ireland's plain folio is €5, about R91. New Zealand's record of title is NZ$8, about R72, and its paid comparables-and-valuation report from QV is NZ$29,99, about R271. Ontario's parcel register is C$35,68, about R404. A US ownership and encumbrance report averages around US$90, about R1 439. At the World Bank's 2025 purchasing-power rate of R7,42 to the international dollar, R99 works out to about 13 international dollars, roughly what a bare Irish register extract costs and less than the UK's, for a report that also plots 15 nearby sales on a map.

Where findproperly sits

findproperly is R99, VAT included, fetched from the deeds office at the moment you buy it. No account, no ID number, just an email address and a card, Apple Pay, EFT, QR or Capitec Pay.

The report is on screen as soon as it lands, and the email that follows carries a PDF copy as well as a link that opens it for 30 days. The report page has Download PDF, Share and Print, and the printed page and the PDF both show the property's boundary drawn over satellite imagery, not just a table. Make a free account under the same email, from a browser you've opened the report in, and it stays in your library after the link runs out.

We don't sell an automated valuation. An estimate isn't the same as what similar properties nearby actually sold for, and we'd rather show you the sales and let you judge. If the deeds office has nothing on the address, you pay nothing.

See what one costs on /report.