deedy Is Live: Why You No Longer Have to Pay 7% to Sell Your Home

For generations, selling a home in South Africa has come with an unwritten rule: to sell it, you must hand a significant slice of its value to a middleman. That fee has historically sat between 5% and 7%, plus VAT. In today's economy, where every rand of equity counts, that percentage translates into an astonishing amount of money.

Consider a middle-market home in a suburb of Gqeberha, Durban, or Cape Town, valued at R2,000,000. At the upper end of the range, a 7% commission means the agency claims R140,000 from the proceeds of the sale. Add 15% VAT and the deduction climbs to R161,000.

By the time the transfer is lodged at the Deeds Office and the reconciliation is done, the seller is left with a noticeably lighter cheque. For many families, that R161,000 is years of scraping together a deposit, thousands of hours of overtime, or the entire profit they were counting on to downsize or fund their children's education.

The interesting question isn't whether that fee is large. It obviously is. The interesting question is why it's still 7% and the answer lies in history.

The 7% Was a Rational Price In 1985

To understand the commission, you have to understand the world it was designed for.

The percentage-based model was built in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and in that era it made complete sense. The property market ran on friction. Information was local and jealously guarded. Everything was manual.

Before the internet, selling a home demanded real infrastructure. Middlemen printed full-colour catalogues. They bought expensive display advertising in the local newspaper. It kept a premium storefront on a high street to pull in walk-in buyers. They maintained physical files of buyer preferences, matched by hand. A middleman's day was spent driving across town to source listings, flipping through index cards to pair a buyer with a house, and coordinating every viewing over a landline.

In that world, a high percentage-based commission was a genuinely logical mechanism. It absorbed enormous operational cost and risk. You weren't only paying for a sale; you were paying for an expensive, human, analogue machine that had no cheaper alternative. The 7% was the price of access to a market you simply could not reach on your own.

That is the part worth sitting with: the commission was never arbitrary. It was fair for its time.

Then the Ground Moved

The entire information paradigm of the property market has since inverted. The overwhelming majority of buyers now begin their search online, from the couch, on a phone. Nobody drives to a high-street office to peer at window cards anymore.

The core operational act of a middleman has quietly shrunk to this: take photographs, write a short description, and upload the file to an automated syndicator that pushes it to the portals where buyers already are. The technology does the heavy lifting of matching your home to active buyers. The cost of reaching the entire national buyer pool once the whole justification for the fee collapsed to a flat, nominal amount.

Everything that made 7% reasonable disappeared. The 7% didn't. That is the anomaly at the heart of the market: a price built for a high-friction world, still being charged in a near-frictionless one.

Who Traditional Selling Is Still Right For

Here's where honesty matters, because the full-service middleman has not become worthless. For the right seller, that fee still buys something real.

Picture a R10m home. At the same rate, the commission is R700,000 over R800,000 with VAT. For most people, that number is simply obscene. But for some sellers, it isn't.

If you are selling at that level, your time may genuinely be worth more than the fee. You may want a professional to host every viewings, , and carry the entire transaction end to end while you stay focused on the business, or the family, or the life that made the home possible in the first place.

For the seller who can comfortably absorb R700,000, and who has honestly decided they do not want to lift a finger, a full-service middleman isn't a rip-off. It's a concierge. And concierges are worth paying for.

There is no shame in that choice. White-glove service is a real product with real value, and for the genuinely time-starved and the genuinely wealthy, it can be a fair trade.

But be honest with yourself about whether that is actually you.

Because for the overwhelming majority of South African sellers, it isn't. The R2m family we started with cannot wave away R161,000. That money was never a concierge fee they happily chose, it's the deposit that took years, next year's school fees, the whole profit they were counting on. They were never offered a considered choice between premium service and doing a little themselves. They were simply handed a bill.

The New Option: Keep What's Yours

If you know your home, you're willing to do a little yourself, That's deedy.

Instead of signing away a percentage of your asset, deedy lets you list your home directly, in front of serious buyers, for a flat R199 per month until it sells.

Through deedy you can order a data-driven property valuation report built on Deeds Office records and real recent suburb sales, so you set your price from fact, not flattery.

On a R2m sale, that's as much as R140,000 staying exactly where it belongs: with you.

deedy Is Live! Here's How to Start

Price it with real data. Order a deedy valuation report built on Deeds Office records and genuine recent sales in your suburb.

List it directly, from R199/m. Put your home in front of buyers yourself, for a flat monthly fee until it sells. No commission, no mandate, no lock-in.

Keep your commission. When the sale registers, the equity that would have gone to a middleman stays with you.

Launch offer: your first two months of listing are free for new sellers. (New listings; [T&Cs apply]

The 7% was fair once. For a certain seller, it still is. For everyone else, no one knows your property like you do and now you can finally sell it that way.

Sell your own home at deedy.co.za. Property, direct.