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Unpacking your Cape Town holiday: The unequal and concentrated impacts of Airbnbs

Unpacking your Cape Town holiday: The unequal and concentrated impacts of Airbnbs
Cloé St-Hilaire, Sarita Pillay Gonzalez and Nick Budlender
By Cloé St-Hilaire, Sarita Pillay Gonzalez and Nick Budlender
27 Mar 2025
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Our careful analysis of available data on Airbnbs in Cape Town, combined with insights from recent peer-reviewed studies about short-term rentals globally, paints a different picture to the one from Airbnb about its positive economic impacts that benefit the entire city and all its residents.

By the time “Nomad Week” in Cape Town had ended, an online petition in opposition to the event had garnered more than 3,000 signatures. As Daily Maverick has reported, debates are raging about the impact that digital nomads and short-term rentals are having on Cape Town’s rental costs and property prices.

In an interview earlier this year, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis expressed interest in regulating short-term rentals, especially those operating as “permanent Airbnbs”. However, James Vos, Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for economic opportunities, recently affirmed support for digital nomads while quoting an Airbnb report to refute the claim that short-term rentals affect housing. In the report, Airbnb shared a positive outlook on its economic impacts, writing that 49% of the hosts it surveyed in Cape Town “said that the extra income helps them afford their homes”. Airbnb also claimed that short-term rentals have a negligible impact on available housing stock in the City, with about 7,362 listings serving as dedicated Airbnb rentals, or only 0.9% of all formal housing units. 

As scholars specialising in housing justice and urban struggles, we wanted to offer a response by carefully analysing available data on Airbnbs in Cape Town, and combining this analysis with insights from recent peer-reviewed studies about short-term rentals globally. This raises a different story to the one put forward by Airbnb about its positive economic impacts that benefit the entire City and all its residents. Rather, our analysis reveals that short-term renting in Cape Town is a highly concentrated business, both in terms of geographic location and hosts. Crucially, short-term rentals in the City have increasingly become commercial operations, with home sharing representing only a fraction of entire home listings available.

Using Airbnb data provided by Inside Airbnb from 2019 to September 2024 focusing only on entire home listings, we show how Airbnb has been a for-profit business that benefits larger, commercial players who operate in well-located and well-serviced parts of Cape Town. These areas include neighbourhoods in the inner-city and Atlantic Seaboard that continue to bear the racialised and classed marks of apartheid spatial planning, and have had no affordable, state-subsidised housing built in the post-apartheid period. 

The increasing commercialisation of Airbnbs in Cape Town


As Airbnb argued in its recent report on Cape Town, when speaking of the positive impacts of short-term rentals in cities, advocates often say home sharing helps owners supplement their incomes and pay for their home loans. While there may indeed be benefits to home sharing, the situation in Cape Town leads us to believe that most listings are not in fact home sharing, or part-time principal residences. Drawing on peer-reviewed studies from Canada, France, and New York, there are two indicators that can help determine whether listings are commercial rather than a principal residence: full-time status and multi-listing status. 

Generally, a listing is considered to be operated full time if it is booked more than 90 nights per year. This first indicator is used by Airbnb to determine what it labels “dedicated rentals” — and which it says have a negligible impact on available housing stock in Cape Town. We argue, however, that in addition to full-time listings, hosts with multiple listings are also operating commercial operations. 

A listing is considered to be a multi-listing if it is operated by a host with more than one entire-home listing. These could be management firms who “professionalise Airbnb spaces” in Cape Town and outsource rental linen and cleaning services, or they might be individuals who own and list multiple properties. Whether or not they are booked full time, multi-listings cannot be ignored and also point to housing that is probably being removed from the long-term rental market.

By extending our analysis to consider full-time status and multi-listing status, we found that commercial listings are becoming more prevalent in Cape Town. In 2024, more than 60% of Airbnb listings in Cape Town appear to be commercial listings (Figure 1). A total of 2,153 listings are both full-time and multi-listing operations; 1,209 are full-time single-listing operations; 8,921 are multi-listing operations only; and only 7,674 are non-commercial listings.



Figure 1. Monthly entire-home listing count by commercial status, 2019-2024.

Given data limitations, we expect our number of full-time short-term rentals to be a significant underestimate. Our findings, however, still present a counterpoint to Airbnb’s estimate of commercial listings based only on full-time listings, which it placed at 7,362. By adding multi-listings, as other scholars have in other studies, Cape Town is in fact shown to have a highly commercialised short-term rental market. 

Spatial inequality and the concentration of listings and hosts


Research has already shown that short-term rental listings in Cape Town are densest in areas near the ocean and close to tourist draw cards such as Table Mountain. Many of these  neighbourhoods are predominantly white and affluent: along the Atlantic Seaboard, and in and around the CBD. Their skewed demographics are shaped by racialised apartheid-era forced removals — epitomised by District Six — and a contemporary discriminative housing market dominated by private developers and exclusive residential developments. 

The concentration of the highest prices of Airbnbs in Cape Town is in Sea Point, a neighbourhood with its own lesser-known history of apartheid-era race-based displacement — and the site of a more recent struggle to compel the state to build social housing for working-class black and coloured people on public land. With limited well-located housing options, Cape Town’s workforce — including outsourced cleaners who work in short-term rentals — commute long and costly distances to work from peripheral townships and informal settlements. 

There are notably lower densities and prices of Airbnb listings in these historically black and coloured townships, even if they are proximate to the coast. Our analysis extends prior to research to show, first, that there is spatial inequality and spatial concentration in commercial listings (Figure 2). Second, we argue that there is also host concentration (Figure 3). These are mega-hosts with commercial listings who agglomerate properties in certain parts of the city (Figure 4). 



Figure 2. Number of commercial Airbnb listings by ward.

While Airbnb portrays marginal housing loss in Cape Town in its report, we argue that this is because it only focuses on full-time operations, overlooks the question of multi-listings altogether and analyses Cape Town as a whole rather than looking at the spatial distribution of listings. 

Of importance to Capetonians is whether Airbnbs remove housing from the long-term market: which they do when they are either operated full time or taken out from the market to be part of a commercial host’s portfolio of listings dedicated to short-term renting. In both cases, these Airbnbs are not a supplemental income activity for homeowners trying to afford their home. If we combine full-time operations and multi-listings together, the housing loss increases to 12,283, or 1.5% of all formal housing units in Cape Town.

However, importantly, this housing loss is distributed unevenly. Referring to Figure 2, we can see that housing loss occurs in well-located areas close to tourist attractions, with histories of forced removals, and which are already exclusionary, affluent and predominantly white. This also includes Woodstock and Salt River where coloured and black, working-class and long-term residents have faced post-apartheid gentrification-induced evictions — as was elucidated in a recent Constitutional Court case. 

Additionally, Cape Town’s host concentration is high. In Figure 4, we see that the top 10% of hosts operate 42% of all listings, the top 5% operate 32% of listings, and the top 1% (only 112 hosts) operate 20% of all listings — one out of five listings. 



Figure 3. Entire home listings concentration among hosts.

These mega-hosts concentrate their commercial operations in the well-located parts of the city close to tourist attractions. The top six hosts collectively operate 717 entire-home listings, spatially concentrated around the Atlantic Seaboard. All but one (Jayson) are short-term rental property managers that advertise either for buildings that seem to be entirely dedicated to short-term renting or multiple properties across Cape Town. 

Nox is a short-term rental property manager founded in 2003 focusing primarily on luxury properties. Perch is a short-term rental property manager primarily for multiple-unit properties such as apartment hotels (entire buildings) for short-term stays. Soughted is a short-term rental property manager with a portfolio of more than 500 properties, partnering with developers, hotel owners, private equity funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs). LaStay is a short-term rental property manager and seems to be renting multiple units in the same buildings (such as Sussex Mews). Jayson is a host with listings that seem to be located mostly in new constructions. Host Agents is a short-term rental property manager and also seems to be renting multiple units in the same buildings (such as Ellipse Waterfall). 



Figure 4. Location of the listings of the top 6 hosts.

Host concentration and the spatial concentration of commercial operations calls into question the presumption of home sharing, and necessitates an interrogation of who accrues the greatest economic benefits from short-term rentals, and in which areas. Relatedly, Airbnb’s statements regarding the platform’s contribution to Cape Town’s labour market and labour income requires further research. 

Studies elsewhere have shown that Airbnb partially acts as a substitution to the hotel industry, especially when it comes to holiday periods or leisure markets. The revenue derived from short-term rental platforms is often not entirely “new”, but rather a transfer from previous spending related to hotel stays. While Airbnb can have a positive impact on hospitality, tourism, and leisure employment, short-term rental platform employment is often precarious, with workers receiving little to no job security and often reproducing gendered or racial forms of exploitation.

Cape Town is a deeply unequal city — and our preliminary research on short-term rentals suggests it reflects, and perhaps even emboldens, this spatial inequality and concentration of wealth.  It is worth noting that calls for the regulation of short-term rentals are coming from segments of the hospitality industry, and middle-class locals being priced out of the high-end rental market by dollar-wielding digital nomads. 

It is pertinent to consider regulatory lessons from elsewhere to regulate short-term rentals, alongside other systematic interventions already called for by spatial justice advocates and movements — such as rent controls, inclusionary housing, and well-located state-subsidised housing — in order to decisively reshape the (post)apartheid city. DM

Cloé St-Hilaire is a PhD Candidate in Planning at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where she holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. She is part of the Urban Politics and Governance research group at McGill, and has co-authored numerous reports on short-term rentals, evictions, and housing transitions. She is also affiliated with the Housing and Urban Justice Project at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Sarita Pillay Gonzalez is a lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies (GAES) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Johannesburg. She is also member of the Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) at Wits and an affiliate of the Housing and Urban Justice Project at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF) at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Nick Budlender is an independent urban policy researcher whose work focuses on land and housing. Nick’s work has predominantly centred around issues relating to the delivery of well-located affordable housing by the state and private sector, the use of public land, and equitable urban governance. He holds a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Sheffield.

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