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According to data from Inside Airbnb, there are currently more Airbnb sites in the City of Cape Town than in the cities of Amsterdam, San Francisco and the city-state of Singapore combined.

A collaborative project sourced and visualised data on the number of Airbnb sites in different cities around the globe, and found there are just over 21,000 Airbnbs in Cape Town.

Based on Western Cape government data, there were 4.7 million people who lived in Cape Town as of 2021. There are in the order of seven million people in the cities mentioned above, based on different statistical releases. That means there are less than 20,000 Airbnb listings across the cities listed.

The below data from Airbnb gives a good idea of how many listings Cape Town has:

In Cape Town, the Airbnb sites are dotted around the city, but the greatest concentration of listings is in the City Bowl and the Camps Bay and Sea Point areas. There are very few Airbnb listings in the Cape Flats.

The site however did not include stats on elsewhere in South Africa.

Airbnb is perhaps the best-known short-term rental site, but many others have also risen to prominence such as Booking.com and the South African LekkeSlaap.

In a statement announcing a memorandum of understanding that was reached between the South African Department of Tourism and Airbnb at the start of September, Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille said little was known about the short-term rental sector in the country.

“Insufficient information is available about the unregulated short-term rental subsector, and this hampers informed policy decision-making.”

Velma Corcoran, the regional lead of the Middle East and Africa at Airbnb, said Airbnb welcomed the opportunity to work with the department to regulate the industry.

How this is going to affect those with rental units in the coming years is still murky, but the stats paint a stark picture of a city that seems to cater only to visitors these days. Expect some by-laws to be thought up in the near future.

[source:news24]