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