For most South Africans, Buying a home is the biggest financial commitment they have ever made. It is one of the least transparent. Listing sites show what's for sale, but they provide little insight into what a suburb is actually doing – whether prices are rising or stable, how long properties stay on the market, what rental yields look like, or whether a new development across the road is about to flood the area with supply.
A small Cape Town start-up called FindHomes is trying to bridge that information gap. It describes itself as building “the asset intelligence layer South Africa never had”.
Co-founded by Adrian Bunge and Joe Eyre, find home Over the past 18 months it has built a search and analytics platform that combines natural language queries, image recognition, suburb-level investment data and an AI agent that produces market reports on-demand over WhatsApp. The company recently announced that it is actively raising capital after a long time in the works.
CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Bunge, comes from a family of property investors and has 12 years of software engineering experience in financial services and start-ups. He wrote a guidebook called The eight laws of property investment in South Africa And building the technology stack of the platform itself.
Eyre, Chief Development Officer, brings a global marketing background spanning Epic Games' Quixel and Unreal Engine divisions, the expansion of streaming service iFlix to over one million African users, and regional growth at Opera Mini.
visual data
The original story is personal. Bunge's mother bought an apartment in Rondebosch, at the peak of the market, seven years ago. Demand has since softened and many new developments have come online. To this day, the apartment cannot be sold for what he paid. “The mistake could have been completely avoided if we had been able to access the data,” Bunge said in an interview with TechCentral this week. “We didn't know what we didn't know.”
The diagnosis, that property buyers are being blinded by a market that hides the data they need most, is driving the product road map. FindHomes' search interface accepts natural language queries. A buyer can specify a 15-minute drive to a particular school, and the system, using Google's Location API, will only display properties within that envelope.
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The platform also indexes the photos in each listing, so a query like “Kitchen with mountain view” returns properties where the visual data – not just the agent's written description – confirms the amenity.
Beyond search, FindHomes produces analytical reports at the suburb level. These include market days, ratio of mandates sold versus expired, months of supply, frequency and depth of price cuts and price-per-square-metre trends. The data is taken from karma records and the company's own listing monitoring. A separate set of tools predicts rental yields by matching sales values with rental data, what Bunge calls the holy grail of property investment.
The most distinctive product is Lola, an AI agent that runs on WhatsApp and is currently in early access for Plus subscribers. Users can use it to compare suburbs, analyze individual listings against comparable sales, or assess new construction developments. The choice of WhatsApp as the interface was deliberate: it requires no app downloads and is the channel estate agents themselves prefer, Bunge said.
According to him, avoiding hallucinations is the company's toughest engineering problem. FindHomes addresses this by routing the agent through real data sources, executing code for any calculations, and passing the output through a second small model for validation, rather than allowing it to be generated from context.
“This is a multimillion-dollar investment for people,” Bunge said. “Although we're not giving investment advice, we really don't want anyone to make a mistake.”
The data foundation is built largely on scraping estate agency websites. Bunge claims coverage is around 95%, and the company provides agents with a takedown link if they want to remove their listings. A recent partnership with geospatial data firm AfriGIS will add flood-risk overlays, with lightning-risk data planned for the eventual Gauteng expansion. For now, FindHomes only operates in the Western Cape.
Price determination
FindHomes also offers a free tier along with a paid Plus membership:
- The free tier includes AI-powered search, traffic-based filtering, price-per-square-meter analysis, and customizable property alerts.
- The Plus tier, at R3 000 for three months – R1 000/month – unlocks historical sales data for all Cape Town suburbs up to 2022, rental and yield forecasts on every sales listing, one-on-one expert guidance and early access to Lola.
The team is fully prepared and has just raised its first capital. Bunge said he is open to angel investing, but is looking for backers who can provide industry introductions and advice rather than just writing checks. The company was recently a top-10 finalist at the Innovation City Startup of the Year Awards and presented at the Africa Tech Week Pitching Den.
The tough question is whether an intelligence-based product can hold its own against existing ones that already own listing traffic and can, in theory, build similar AI features.
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FindHomes' bet is that trust – accuracy, transparency, clear framing of property buyers rather than agents as the primary customer – is structurally difficult for portal businesses to replicate.
If the bet succeeds, the company can do something more interesting instead of competing on features. This may ultimately change the behavior of the market. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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