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.

We dug into the data. See all the data here.