Cape Town Mayor Geordie Hill-Lewis has argued that foreign money only touches the top end of the city's increasingly inaccessible property market. Daily Maverick dug into Airbnb's data to test the claim, and found that foreign hosts were offering modest flats.
Amid growing outrage about Cape Town's rising property prices, Mayor Jordyn Hill-Lewis wrote a GroundUp op-ed in December 2025 Designed to clear up some popular misconceptions.
Hill-Lewis wrote, “Foreign buyers are not the villains in Cape Town's story.”
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He acknowledged that foreign property ownership in Cape Town has increased from 2.5% of purchases to 4.3% between 2020 and 2024 since Covid.
But these buyers, Hill-Lewis argued, “are largely clustered on the Atlantic coastline and parts of the Helderberg region. These are luxury neighborhoods in the mountains and on the beach”.
Foreign demand pushed prices “to the top” of the market, Mayer wrote.
“It's comfortable to blame foreigners, but that's not serious analysis.”
Yet the perception persists that foreign money is at least partly responsible for distorting the Cape Town property market.
“Note that in addition to the different earning potential for us (ie, earning in euros or dollars), I have also heard stories about foreigners who already own property in their local country taking the funds from their Access Bonds to buy a cash house in the Cape. This means they can benefit from significantly lower interest rates in their home countries (for example, the Netherlands' interest rates sit consistently below…