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 that runs from a R19 deeds enquiry at the registry itself to R680 a month for dedicated CMA software, and every option in between 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 you have to be able to prove. The adjustments and the trend commentary are where an agent's local knowledge earns its keep.

Comparable sales: what counts, and how to read them

Comparable sales are the registered sales of properties near enough to yours, and recent enough, to say something about its price. The price that counts is the one in the deeds record, not the asking price. The deeds registries keep the public land register, and the deeds office's services page lists the purchase price of a property among what its DeedsWeb service retrieves (Deeds Registration: services (opens in a new tab), read 6 October 2026).

A CMA hands you a set, so read the set rather than any one sale. Start with the spread: the lowest price, the middle one and the highest. Then ask why each outlier sits where it does. A sale far above the rest might be a bigger house, a renovated one, or a transfer from two years back in a rising market. Weigh the recent sales more than the old ones, and the ones on your own street more than the ones across the suburb.

A registered price also leaves things out. It doesn't say what condition the house was in, whether the kitchen had just been redone, whether there was a view or a busy road outside. Those are the adjustments described above, and they stay the agent's judgement. An asking price isn't on the register at all, so a property that's listed today but hasn't transferred has no comparable price yet. The deeds record what happened. They don't record why.

findproperly supplies the set, not the reading. A report sets 15 nearby registered sales beside one property, each with its price, date, size and distance, all from the deeds office, and it adjusts nothing. It is not a valuation, not a registered valuer's opinion and not an estimate. You can see what a findproperly report shows around one property on its own page, or search the deeds office record for one property to start a report. It also lists that property's own transfer history, each earlier transfer with its price and date.

If you'd rather make the deeds office enquiry yourself, how to check a title deed online sets out both routes and what each costs.

Where the data comes from

Every comparable sale price in a South African CMA starts in the same place: 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. Everyone between you and the registry (portal, data company or CMA-specific tool) is repackaging that same feed for you: cleaned up, run through comparables logic or a valuation model, laid out nicely. You're paying 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. There's no public figure for it.

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 you the per-lookup economics underneath it.

CMAInfo is the only tool here built around the CMA itself 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 sells a Market Intelligence Report line directly on its 2026 rate card too, 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 keeping the comparable sales your firm has already paid to see, instead of renting the same registry facts back in a new PDF every time. findproperly is one way to do that. A report still costs you money, the same as it does anywhere else in that table, and we say what it costs before we pull it. What's different is what's left afterwards: every report brings back 15 registered sale prices around the property, and those stay in your firm's own records. Price another house on that street next year, and some of those sales are already yours: who sold, when, and for how much. That report still costs a credit. The comparables you've already paid for don't.