Cape Town leads charge as Airbnb boom ejects long-term tenants
Cape Town's growing shortage of rental properties is prompting landlords to demand double-digit rental increases when leases come up for renewal
In the City Bowl and surrounds, rental flats and townhouses have become as scarce as hen's teeth as investors increasingly let their units out for shorter stays via Airbnb. That's in stark contrast to Johannesburg and Pretoria, where a growing oversupply of rental apartments are forcing landlords to settle for annual rental increases of no more than 4%-6%. "That's way down on the 8%-10% average increases buy-to-let investors in Gauteng were still achieving 12 to 18 months ago," said Louw Liebenberg, CEO of residential rental processing firm PayProp. He notes that South Africa's buy-to-let market has become increasingly location driven, with the rental performance gap between different cities, provinces and price categories widening markedly over the past 12 months. While PayProp's latest rental index, drawn from the payment data of around 85,000 leases across South Africa, shows that average monthly rentals for the country as a whole were up a respectable 6.6% to R7,062.91 in the fo...
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