📝 By Alastair Otter, Gemma Ritchie and Ro Manoim
There were 25,816 Airbnbs listed in Cape Town in December 2024. This is 2,798 more than in March 2024.
This number has also increased by more than 5,000 since we first visited this topic in September 2023. At that time there were 20,583 listings.
This means Cape Town has roughly the same number of listings as other major cities in the world including Mexico City (26,281) and Tokyo (21,058) and Istanbul (29,400).
But this number is significantly lower than London with more than 95,000 listings and Paris with more than 91,000.
Where are Cape Town’s Airbnbs? And which are the most expensive?
Airbnb has come under fire in many cities around the world because of the rapid growth in listings and particularly the number of multi-listing owners. For many city managers the growth in short-term rentals like Airbnb is worrying as it reduces access to long-term housing for residents.
Airbnb operators also tend to focus on high-traffic areas closer to the centre of cities which means less rental space is available to those that work in the city, pushing them further out to areas where there is space and more affordable rentals. But this also often puts additional strain on transport systems to get workers back into the city.
In Cape Town the city centre and the nearby Seapoint, Camps Bay and Clifton areas are home to the most Airbnb listings in the city. In the CBD there are more than four times the number of listings than in most other areas.
The CBD listings, however, don’t command nearly the same prices as Camps Bay and Clifton listings, and the more affluent suburbs of Bishops Court and Constantia move into the higher price brackets.
Also more outlying areas closer to Stellenbosch command better prices as the listings attract the country & wine tourists.
Multi-listing empires
While the original concept of Airbnb was for homeowners to make a little extra money from renting out a room or a flatlet on their property, the opportunity has also created a growing industry of people operating two, ten or even more rental listings.
In Cape Town a third of properties listed on Airbnb are managed by operators with 10 or more listings.
Two thirds of the listings in Cape Town are single listings.
Or, looked at another way, 15,588 of the 25,816 listings in Cape Town are operated by owners with more than one listing. In most parts of the world this is the most common pattern, with the exception of Paris where tighter regulations around short-term rentals have switched the pattern. In Paris a new cap limiting short-term rentals to 90 days a year instead of the previous 120 per year have begun to change the face of the Airbnb market.
Similarly cities like Montreal in Canada has started to introduce limits on when Airbnbs can operate, gradually pushing operators towards more long-term stays.
For example: In Cape Town 98.6% of rentals through Airbnb are short-term stays. In Montreal just 43.8% of rentals are short-term stays.
