Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has argued that foreign money touches only the top end of the city's increasingly unaffordable property market. Daily Maverick scraped Airbnb's data to test the claim, and found overseas hosts letting modest flats.

Amid rising outrage about Cape Town's spiralling property prices, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis wrote a GroundUp op-ed in December 2025 designed to correct some popular misconceptions.

"Foreign buyers are not the villains in Cape Town's story," Hill-Lewis wrote.

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He acknowledged that foreign property ownership in Cape Town had risen since Covid, from 2.5% to 4.3% of purchases between 2020 and 2024.

But these buyers, Hill-Lewis argued, "overwhelmingly cluster along the Atlantic Seaboard and pockets of the Helderberg region. These are luxury neighbourhoods on mountainsides and coastlines".

Foreign demand pushed up prices "at the very top end" of the market, the mayor wrote.

"Blaming foreigners is comforting, but it is not serious analysis."

Yet the perception that foreign money is at least partly to blame for distorting the Cape Town property market continues to endure.

"Note that in addition to having different earning potential to us (ie, earning in euros or dollars), I've also heard stories about foreigners who already own property in their local country taking funds from their access bonds to purchase homes cash in the Cape. Meaning that they can benefit from the substantially lower interest rates in their home countries (eg, Netherlands interest rate sits consistently below...