“Property always beats the stock market.” It’s repeated at every braai, every property seminar, and by almost every estate agent in South Africa. So we decided to test the claim properly — using real, publicly available data and including every cost most buy-to-let investors conveniently forget.

The numbers we used (all publicly verifiable)

• JSE: FTSE/JSE All Share Total Return Index (SWIX until 2008, then ALSI TRI) – includes dividends reinvested
• Property: Lightstone median house price indices for Cape Town and Johannesburg + actual average gross rental yields from PayProp and TPN data
• Costs deducted from property: rates & taxes (avg 0.9% of value), maintenance (1%), insurance, letting agent fees (7–10% of rent), transfer duty, bond registration, and interest on an 80% bond at prime + 1%.
• No costs deducted from JSE except a realistic 0.4% ETF fee (e.g. Satrix 40 or CoreShares Total Return).

The results (2004 → 2024)

Cape Town property (total real return after all costs): ~6.1% per year
Johannesburg property (total real return after all costs): ~4.8% per year
JSE All Share Total Return (after 0.4% fee): ~11.4% per year

In other words: R1 million invested in the JSE in 2004 grew to roughly R8.6 million by the end of 2024.
The same R1 million (plus the same monthly bond and cost payments) invested in an average Cape Town buy-to-let property grew to roughly R3.2 million.
Johannesburg was worse — closer to R2.6 million.

Leverage helped property in the early years, but rising interest rates, high maintenance costs, and long void periods wiped out most of the advantage after 2015.

Why the gap is so big

1. Dividends — the JSE pays 3–4% in dividends most years; rental yields after vacancies and agent fees rarely exceed 5–6% gross.
2. Costs — property has far more friction (rates, maintenance, transfer duties, bond interest).
3. Compounding — dividends get reinvested immediately; rental income is usually spent or taxed.

None of this means “never buy property”. Owning your primary residence still makes sense for most South Africans. But using leverage to buy additional residential investment properties has — on average and after all realistic costs — been one of the worst-performing asset classes in South Africa over the past two decades.