Ordering Django queryset by a @property

You can't do that because that property is not in MySQL, but in your python code. If you really want to do this, you can on the client-side(though it will be very slow):

sorted(Thing.objects.all(), key=lambda t: t.name)

order_by happens on the sql level, so it can't make use of properties, only field data.

have a look at the queryset api, you may be able to make use of e.g. extra to annotate your query and sort on that