What is a CMA and what does one cost in South Africa in 2026?

A comparative market analysis, a CMA, is the report an agent builds to price a property against recent sales of genuinely similar homes nearby: same suburb, similar size, similar condition, sold recently enough to still reflect the market. What one costs depends on who packages it for you. In 2026 the answer runs from a R19 deeds enquiry at the registry itself to R680 a month for dedicated CMA software, and every option between those two repackages the same root record: what a comparable property actually sold for, as registered at the Deeds Office.

What goes into one

A proper CMA is more than a list of nearby sale prices. The comparables need filtering on the things that actually move value: suburb or street, property type, size, bedroom and bathroom count, condition, sale recency. Then come the adjustments a straight comparison misses. A renovated kitchen. A busy road. A better view. Add enough market-trend context to tell the seller whether the suburb is rising or flat this quarter, and whether today's asking price is the right one. The comparables are the part that has to be evidenced. The adjustments and the trend commentary are where an agent's local knowledge earns its keep.

Where the data comes from

Every comparable sale price in a South African CMA ultimately comes from the Deeds Registration branch, the government office that records property transfers. Its regulated fee schedule, effective 1 April 2026 to 28 February 2027, prices a deeds enquiry at R19, daily transfer information at R19 per property, and registration on its DeedsWeb self-service portal at R229 plus R19 a month. That's the floor. Every commercial vendor between an agent and the registry (portal, data company or CMA-specific tool) is repackaging that same feed: cleaning it, adding comparables logic or valuation modelling, presenting it, and charging for the packaging.

The tools agents pay for

Lightstone sells once-off residential reports: Property, Town, Suburb, Estate and Sectional Schemes reports at R138 plus VAT each, Transfers and Owners in Complex reports at R170 plus VAT, and Property Risk reports at R255 plus VAT (its online property reports page, accessed 16 August 2026). The Property Toolkit subscription, built for professionals and bundling several report types with paid add-ons like automated valuation, is priced only after a sales conversation. No public subscription figure exists.

WinDeed, under its Lexis AgentIQ brand, sells agency-branded CMA and sales reports built on its own deeds-search infrastructure, advertised as offering "unlimited sales report generation" once subscribed. Neither the AgentIQ subscription price nor a bundled per-report fee is published on the AgentIQ page itself. WinDeed's general search pricing, R21.65 to R25.67 incl VAT per Deeds Office search effective 25 March 2026, at least shows the per-lookup economics underneath it.

CMAInfo is the only tool in this comparison built around the CMA workflow rather than around something else. The pricing is plain SaaS: R680 a month per office excl VAT, plus R85 a month per additional user up to 20 per office, with per-transaction fees for anything that touches live data. A deeds query is R29.50, a title deed R110.

Property24 also sells a Market Intelligence Report line directly on its 2026 rate card, from R375 to R1,026 a month depending on tier, separate from its listing subscription.

Owning your comparables vs renting a PDF

Nearly every tool in that table shares one trait: you pay per report or per month for access, and what comes back is a document, not a dataset you keep. The next property in the same street sends you back to the same vendor, paying again for comparables that overlap heavily with the last report you bought. That's a fair trade if your agency prices property occasionally. It's a poor one if pricing property is what your agency does all day.

The alternative is to start owning the comparable sales your firm has already paid to see, rather than renting the same registry facts in a new PDF every time. findproperly is one way to do that: every report returns 15 registered sale prices that stay in your firm's own records, so the comparables are still there the next time a property in that street needs pricing, not gone the moment the report closes.