Host with the most
Cape Town now has more Airbnb listings than Sydney, Toronto, Berlin and Barcelona and the numbers keep climbing. Between September 2023, when we first visited this issue, and September 2025, the city has gained more than 6,000 listings, pushing the total to 26,877. Many of those new listings are in the high-value areas in and around the city centre and on the Atlantic seaboard which are desirable for tourists and other short-term visitors. But for local residents this means long-term accommodation is becoming expensive and hard to find, with many people pushed to more outlying parts of the city to find homes.
But there is another issue the City of Cape Town is now trying to address: Airbnb operators that operate dozens of short-term rentals without paying commercial rates and are essentially operating as unlicensed hotels. 40% of all Airbnb listings for Cape Town are managed by just 7.8% of hosts. The most active hosts have hundreds of listings. One host has 175 listings, another 161. These are not spare bedrooms and granny flats; they are commercial accommodation operations.
Now the city is taking action. A proposed Short-Term Letting Bylaw would reclassify properties listed for more than half the year as commercial premises, requiring operators to pay hotel-grade rates. Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has been blunt: the current system is blocking formal hotel investment and squeezing residents out of their own city.
In this week’s feature we dug into the numbers behind the issue and found:
- One area in Cape Town has more than 5,700 listings
- Hosts that have close to 200 listings
- The most popular area has more than 350 listings per square kilometre
- Two areas have more than 100 listings per square kilometre
We also created a map to explore the data:
Data rich
Mobile connectivity has changed from a “nice-to-have” for socialising into an essential tool for managing daily life. Today, over 75% of South African households access the internet through their phones, making the mobile device our most important connection to the world around us.
This is why we’re seeing such a strong surge in mobile data subscriptions, which climbed to a record 45.2-million in 2025. While there was a brief dip in numbers back in 2022, the market has since rebounded to new heights, adding millions of new connections as data becomes more affordable and accessible.
But people aren’t just using this extra data for social media. It’s powering a massive shift in how we handle money. As more of us get connected, we’re seeing a huge move toward mobile and real-time payments – the ability to pay someone or a business instantly from your phone.
According to Electrum’s latest research into the future of South African payments, the convenience of instant, digital-first options is quickly replacing the need to carry cash. Whether it’s paying someone back or tapping a phone at a till, mobile data is the invisible engine making life easier and more inclusive for everyone.
To learn more about the trends shaping payments and what the future holds for South Africa, download Electrum’s latest research, South Africa’s Payments Future.
- Produced by The Outlier in partnership with Electrum, the next-generation payments software company, powering payments for banks and retailers.
Slow broadband
Broadband speeds across Brics countries vary greatly; however, two stand out from the rest: Brazil and China. The two are ranked 26th and 27th in global fixed broadband speeds and 1st and 2nd among BRICs countries.
Based on the Ookla Speedtest Global Index as reported in the annual ICASA State of the ICT Sector Report 2026, Brazil takes the top spot for the fastest median download speed at 222 Mega bits per second (Mbps). China was close behind at 221 Mbps.
South Africa ranks the lowest of the Brics countries at 48 Mbps download and an upload median speed of 39Mbps.
🏠 What 28,000 doors tell us about Gauteng
To get 13,795 people in Gauteng to answer 200 questions about their lives, the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO) had to knock on just over 28,000 doors. That is a hit rate of under 50%. Each successful interview runs about 45 minutes. The whole exercise takes years to plan, run and clean.
That is the unglamorous foundation of one of the richest pictures any province in South Africa has of itself. And, as Christian Hamann explained at The Outlier’s Out to Lunch session on 29 April, it is getting harder to maintain.
Read the summary story here. Outlier members can also watch the full recording here.
️ Fuel shock
South Africans woke up to record-high fuel prices on 6 May 2026. A litre of diesel (50ppm) costs R31.38. It’s the first time ever the price has gone over R30. A litre of 95 Octane in Gauteng reached R26.63, its highest price since July 2022.
The fuel prices hit record highs despite the government’s intervention by extending the R3 reduction on the general fuel levy for another month.
Fuel prices have risen due to ongoing tensions between the United States and Iran which have restricted tankers carrying oil and liquid natural gas from the Middle East from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
South Africa imports its diesel from India, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. When it comes to petrol, South Africa imports it from India, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, according to the 2023 South African Energy Trade Report.
Big salaries
The CEO of the Johannesburg Property Company is set to receive a huge pay rise in the 2026/27 financial year. The total package will increase by 62% to R5.5-million, from R3.4-million the previous year.
It is by far the largest single-year remuneration increase among the CEOs of the City of Johannesburg’s municipal entities. The spike is driven not just by a higher base salary, but by an outsized contributions package of R900,000.
Eight CEOs received modest increases of less than 10%. The CEO of City Power’s package is to be cut by 34%. Johannesburg Roads Agency’s CEO also takes a cut of 12%.
The CEO of the Property Company’s total package now exceeds every other entity, including the long-running high earners, Pikitup (R4.5-million), City Power (R3.2-million) and Johannesburg Water (R3.9-million).
Note: Joburg Tourism Company CEO will also get a 62% increase from R1.6-million to R2.6-million. But the City of Johannesburg’s budget books only contained salary data for this CEO for 2025/26 and 2026/27, so it was excluded from the chart.
- Produced in partnership with Our City News.
Congested roads
Cape Town was the third most congested city in Africa in 2025, ahead of Johannesburg, which sits at number six, and Cairo at 12th place.
This is an improvement from being the second-most congested city on the continent in 2023.
Cape Town has an extensive rail network in Metrorail, but mismanagement and corruption of its management agency, the Passenger Rail Agency South Africa (PRASA), saw passenger numbers drop from a high of about 600,000 per day in 2003, making up more than a fifth of all commuter trips, to a low of about 133,000 passengers a day in 2022, down to one out of every 50 daily commuters.
Statistics provided by the City of Cape Town show that the increasing failure of Metrorail services, which reached a low in 2019 and was exacerbated by the covid lockdown, led to increasing use of private cars and minibus-taxis. As Metrorail services have slowly improved, passenger numbers have started recovering, reaching about 200,000 per day by March 2026. This slight recovery is reflected in a proportionate decrease in private car and minibus-taxi use.
- Read the full GroundUp article here.
Reimagining census data
How do we know how many people live in an area when people move faster than institutional organisations can count? That’s where spatial technology steps in.
Join Out to Lunch with the Outlier on 27 May 2026 at 1pm as we speak with GEOTERRAIMAGE‘s Ross Solomons and Elsie Zwennis about the power of spatial data, and what it reveals about South Africa.
Free live. Recording for Outlier members. Questions ahead of time to gemma.ritchie@theoutlier.co.za.
Click here for a link to all references for this newsletter.