Johannesburg has a property shortage. So why aren’t prices rising?
I have spent most of my career watching the Johannesburg residential property market and learning to recognise its patterns. Generally, the rules of supply and demand are fairly simple. When there are too many properties on the market, prices come under pressure. When stock is scarce and buyers compete, sellers gain the upper hand and prices rise.
Except that is not quite what is happening in Johannesburg right now.
The shortage of stock is becoming extraordinary. Looking across nine established Johannesburg suburbs, there were 127 houses listed for sale in December 2025. By July 2026, that number had fallen to just 68 – a decline of almost 47%.
We thought stock levels were low in December. They are significantly worse now – and this is the time of year when, moving towards spring, one would normally expect more properties to start coming onto the market.
So where have all the sellers gone?
What makes this even more interesting is that the buyers are there.
A decent show day would traditionally attract perhaps five to 10 sets of potential buyers. Over the past few months, we have regularly been seeing eight to 10 and often closer to 15. Recently, a show day in Parkwood attracted 22 sets of buyers. Another in Saxonwold attracted 12. Those are exceptionally busy show days.
And yet buyers are extraordinarily price sensitive. They are looking. They are attending. They are interested. But they are not necessarily prepared to compete aggressively or pay substantially more simply because there is little else available.
That is the great Johannesburg property conundrum. The normal relationship between supply, demand and price appears to have broken down. We have very little stock. We have decent buyer activity. But we do not have the kind of price growth one would normally expect. I think we may be experiencing a form of market gridlock.
The cost of moving
One possible explanation is that South Africans simply cannot afford to move as easily as they once could. Property may still be our largest asset, but selling a house does not mean that you can move without sacrificing a substantial portion of its value in transaction costs.
Take a relatively straightforward example:
A homeowner sells a property for R5.3 million. At a 5% commission, the estate agency fee is R265,000 before VAT. The same homeowner then buys a smaller property for R3.8 million. By the time transfer duty, conveyancing and other transaction costs are added, the costs of the round trip can approach R600 000 out of your back pocket – and that’s before the actual physical cost of moving, repairs or renovations.
And then you still have to ask the most important question: where do you go? You may want to downsize, upgrade or move to another suburb. But once you have paid the costs of selling and buying, the alternative property has to make financial sense. Increasingly, it doesn't.
So people stay. They renovate. They adapt. They make do.
And every homeowner who decides not to move removes another property from the market.
A market caught between optimism and anxiety
The FNB Property Barometer has tracked a gradual improvement in house-price growth over the past year, with growth moving from below inflation towards the 5% to 6% range. That suggested a market beginning to recover. But my reading of the latest figures is that momentum is now slowing again. Growth that had been improving month by month appears to be softening, and there is concern that, by the end of the year, property price growth could once again move towards – or even below – inflation.
The reasons are not difficult to understand – South Africans are under pressure. Food, fuel, municipal costs, insurance, security and everyday living expenses continue to eat into disposable income. The war in the Middle East has added to that pressure, with the continued disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz keeping oil prices volatile. If ships continue to be blocked or delayed from passing through the strait, fuel prices are likely to remain under pressure, with the knock-on effect of higher inflation. In a country where almost everything moves by road, higher fuel prices eventually feed into the cost of almost everything, putting further strain on household budgets.
The result is a strange balancing act.
Buyers are interested but cautious. Sellers would like better prices but cannot always afford to move, and the market has enough activity to prevent it from collapsing, but not enough confidence or financial firepower to create a genuine sellers' market.
Perhaps everyone is waiting. Waiting for greater economic certainty. Waiting to see what happens with interest rates, inflation and fuel prices. And perhaps, in Johannesburg, waiting for evidence that the city itself will turn a corner after the elections in November.
Buying a property is ultimately a vote of confidence – not only in the house, but in the suburb, the city and its future. I still believe in Johannesburg's longer-term renaissance. The city has extraordinary assets and enormous potential.
But at the moment, its property market is unusually difficult to read.
After decades of tracking property trends, I have learned to recognise when a market is behaving in an unfamiliar way.
Perhaps the real problem is not supply or demand.
Perhaps the Johannesburg residential market is simply stuck.
Welcome to market gridlock.
ENDS