Frequently asked questions

Yes, scanning needs a free account, and every account gets 1 free teaser scan and 1 free home value estimate to try it, no card required. After that, full reports are paid with credits or included in a plan.

Yes. Estimate My Home gives every free account 1 free estimate: a value range and the headline read on your property, built from a size-based baseline and the comparable pool for your suburb. It is not a cut-down guess with the number hidden. The full report (25 credits, or included in any plan) is what adds the comparable evidence itself, the suburb price history, a condition assessment read from your photos and the negotiation guidance.

Photograph a For Sale board on your phone and Guru reads the agency, agent, reference and any QR code off it, then uses your coordinates to find the matching listing nearby. If the property is not advertised online you still get a street brief instead of nothing: what is being asked on that road, how much stock is around you, and how much of it is on show or under offer. Snap results are never link-shareable, because a snap contains a photo of a private home and where you were standing.

Any public Property24 or Private Property listing works best: paste the link and go. Guru will also attempt other public listing pages.

Teasers arrive in under a minute. A full report runs deep market research and typically takes a few minutes, and the page updates live while Guru works.

Open the report and click the Actions tab (the accent-coloured tab pinned at the right-hand end of the section rail): the first card there downloads the whole report as a branded PDF. There is also a Download PDF item in the ⋮ menu next to any Ready report on your dashboard. PDF export is included on every paid plan; on the free tier the same card has a Print this report button that prints every section through your browser (choose Save as PDF as the destination to keep a file), next to an upgrade prompt.

Every report has its own shareable link. Anyone with the link sees the property and the estimate; the paid market-intelligence widgets stay locked for everyone except the report's owner.

Yes, and a re-run is not just the same report again. Guru analyses the property from scratch with fresh data, then compares the result against your previous run: the report names what changed since last time, and labels the new estimate as consistent with the old one, a justified change, or pulled back to stay consistent. A re-run costs the same credits as the original.

Yes, and it is connected to your account rather than guessing. Ask what your last scan concluded, whether an estimate has finished, how your portfolio is performing, or what the market looks like in a suburb, and it answers from your live data and our own record of what we have concluded there before. It can also file a bug report or a feature request for you.

No. Reports are AI-generated estimates built from real market data. They are not a formal, sworn or bank valuation and are not prepared by a registered property valuer. See our AI Disclaimer.

The same way an analyst would: comparable sales, suburb price levels, official growth indices, and computer vision over the photos for condition and finish. The asking price is never allowed to become the answer: Guru derives its estimate from that evidence, then the server measures it against what the seller is asking and, if the two are within 2% of each other, blends it back toward a size-based baseline the AI never touched and prints the reason on the report.

Because they measure different things. Asking is what the seller hopes for; Guru's estimate is what the evidence supports. The gap between them is your negotiation room: the report quantifies it.

Confidence is earned from the data: how many genuine comparables were found, whether they are sales or asking prices, how tightly they agree, and whether the independent verifier signed off. Thin data means a lower score, shown honestly.

Blurred widgets are locked previews: they show the kind of intelligence a full report contains, with representative (not real) data behind the glass. Subscribing or spending credits unlocks the real thing.

Up to four independent lenses that each produce their own value (the closest comparable, a real sold anchor, suburb floor-rate maths, and your purchase price compounded at suburb growth), shown converging (or not) on Guru's number.

No, and this is the part worth understanding. The server owns the figures and the AI writes the explanation. Price per m², the independent baseline, the confidence range, bond repayments, transfer duty, total acquisition cost, yield and growth projections and the negotiation score are all computed in ordinary code, reproducible and covered by tests. The AI researches the market, reads the photos and explains what it found. Where the two disagree, the code wins and the report records the correction.

Yes. Every estimate is written to a ledger with the shape of the evidence behind it, and when the property later sells, is relisted or is withdrawn, that outcome is scored against the prediction: how far off, in which direction, and whether the real price fell inside the published range. Those scores are what set future confidence ranges, so in time the band on your report reflects where prices actually landed for estimates built on evidence like yours. Today most reports still use a conservative default: a category of evidence needs at least 30 scored outcomes before measurement is allowed to speak, and it can only ever widen a range, never narrow one.

Never. Every comparable is labelled as either a confirmed sale or a price someone is asking, and the label travels all the way from the source to the card you read. Asking evidence is also discounted toward what properties actually fetch before it is allowed to move your estimate, because a listing price is an opening bid and a transfer price is a fact.

No. Sectional title and freehold are different markets that happen to wear similar prices, so a flat is never used as evidence about a house (or the reverse). Guru also refuses to mix a land rate with a floor rate, because they measure different things, and it will use fewer comparables rather than pad the sample with irrelevant ones.

Guru steps down to the strongest evidence it does have and says which route it used, so a thin-data suburb still gets an answer, carrying only the confidence that route actually earns. Where even that is not possible, the report says "not enough data yet" rather than echoing the asking price back at you as though it were a valuation.

Three places: the official StatsSA Residential Property Price Index (monthly since 2010), registered average sale prices per suburb, and archived portal pages going back to around 2011. Every historical dot on a growth chart names and links its source.

The shape comes from the official index; the levels are anchored to real recorded figures. Where a stretch is index-estimated rather than recorded, the chart draws it dashed and the caption says which data tier shaped it.

Current homes on the market divided by the suburb's real monthly sales pace. Under about 4 months favours sellers; over about 6 favours buyers. Guru computes it from registered sales volumes, not guesses.

Yes, two ways: it sharpens your own estimate, and it joins anonymised suburb statistics, but a single owner's report never shapes a suburb curve. Several owners must corroborate a period before Guru trusts it.

Credits are the billing unit for AI reports: a full scan costs 20 credits and a full home value estimate 25. Your plan grants credits every month; top-up packs (40 credits for R99, 120 credits for R249, 300 credits for R549) add more whenever you need them.

Plan credits refresh (and reset) with every monthly cycle, even on annual plans. Top-up credits never expire and are only spent after your plan credits run out.

The discounted intro price applies once, on your first-ever subscription. If you cancel and later re-subscribe, the standard price applies from day one.

Anytime. Upgrades take effect immediately: you pay only the prorated difference for the remainder of your cycle. Downgrades are scheduled for your next renewal and never charge you anything.

Self-serve from your subscription page, anytime. Your plan stays active until the end of the paid period. New subscriptions also carry a 7-day statutory cooling-off period. See the Refund Policy.

A home value estimate runs the full pipeline (vision over your photos and documents, deep research, verification) with no listing to start from. It is our heaviest report, so it is part of a subscription or paid with credits.

Building plans, an offer to purchase, rates and levy statements. Guru reads them with vision AI and uses what it finds to sharpen the estimate.

Three relationships, three tools. The watchlist is an alert wire on a live listing: Guru re-checks it and emails you when the price or availability moves. Saved is your chase: a home you are pursuing gets its own dossier in My Properties, with the watch, the asking-vs-estimate numbers and your private viewing notes. Owned is for homes you actually hold, re-valued monthly from real area appreciation.

A home you are chasing, not one you own. Save it from any scan report and it gets a hunter's page: how long you have been on it, where Guru's estimate sits against the asking price, the watch, and notes only you see. Every account holds a couple of chases free; the Guru plan saves as many as you hunt.

It is the watchlist, and it is part of a subscription. Switch it on from a scan report and Guru re-checks that listing every 7 days for price cuts, price increases, relistings and delistings, then emails you when the seller blinks. Entry-level plans watch up to 3 listings at a time; Guru and Portfolio are uncapped. Pause or remove any of them from your watchlist page.

The homes you own ride the Guru and Portfolio plans, uncapped, each with monthly auto-revaluation from real area appreciation at no AI cost to you. Client mandates are different: every account holds a small book free and every plan holds more, with the pipeline, buyer leads and offers included (see the estate agents section below). Selling tools like the Listing Pack and Agent Leads are credit-priced on every plan.

A Guru and Portfolio feature for serious house hunters. On the My Hunt page you set up to five target suburbs, a price band and a bedroom floor, and every week Guru sends a brief of fresh listings it has observed there, price cuts it spotted, and where asking prices sit. It is built from Guru's own market records across every report it runs, so it covers what Guru has seen, not every listing on the market, and a quiet week sends nothing.

The Book starts free on every account: hold up to 2 open mandates without paying anything. Portfolio is the professional plan: it removes the cap and adds the business numbers on your book. The pipeline board, buyer leads, offers, mandate facts and price history are included at every size, and mandates marked Sold or Withdrawn never use a slot. Guru's intelligence is what credits buy, per card: a listing scan or a Guru estimate whenever a mandate earns it.

Two doors are free on every account: paste the listing link and Guru reads the page once and builds the card (no AI, no credits), or build the card yourself in the wizard. The batch doors ride Portfolio: paste up to ten links at a time, or import a CSV from your office system against our template. Portals usually withhold the street address, so add it once and the card is complete.

Never. The seller details you record on a mandate are your own client records: they never appear anywhere public and are not used to contact anyone. Agent Leads is separate and strictly opt-in on the seller's side.

Every full Home Value Estimate includes a section written for an owner deciding whether to sell: an Ask Ladder of four listing prices (a quick sale, Guru's fair price, an ambitious price and a ceiling), each showing what it typically lands at after the concession buyers in your suburb actually negotiate, how long that tends to take, and where it ranks among live asking prices. A Sell-or-Keep verdict weighs selling now against holding or renting it out, with named drivers. It is part of the standard report on every plan, no extra charge.

The report works out sale price less agent commission and VAT, seller-side compliance certificates, cancelling your bond (including the bank's 90-day notice interest), rates and levy clearance, moving costs, and an estimated capital gains tax figure, leaving your net proceeds. Live sliders let you try a different sale price and watch the numbers move. The CGT figure is an estimate to plan around, not tax advice: talk to a tax practitioner before you rely on it.

Once you have a full Home Value Estimate, Guru can write the listing for you: three description lengths, titles, key highlights, SEO keywords and the photo order to lead with, in four tones, ready to paste onto any portal. It costs 8 credits per pack, and you can regenerate it in a different tone any time.

With a full Home Value Estimate you can opt in to let agents who work your suburb see your home, anonymised, and reach out. It is free for you and non-exclusive, so more than one agent can take it. Agents spend credits to unlock your contact details, which keeps it to agents who are actually serious. You can close the request at any time and agents stop seeing it.

As soon as your Home Value Estimate finishes as a full report. The free teaser does not include it: the Ask Ladder and Sell-or-Keep verdict need the comparable evidence and photo condition read that only a full report runs.

Report and chat processing uses third-party AI providers (currently OpenAI, with Anthropic configurable), including photos and documents you upload for vision analysis. Our providers are contractually restricted from training models on our customers' data.

No. Suburb-level statistics are aggregated and anonymised; your account data, reports, photos and documents are yours. The Privacy Policy has the full picture, including your POPIA rights.

From your profile page: account deletion is self-serve and removes your data as described in the Privacy Policy.

Yes, the Guru chat answers up to 15 messages a day on free accounts and 50 for subscribers. It can file bug reports and feature requests for you, and can hand you to a human anytime.