This article was originally published on Business Day's website. Business Day is a national news website in South Africa.
I didn’t need to spend hours daily to know just how much the Cape Town property market is thriving. Having grown up in the city, I remember when it felt like a town in the 1990s — you better not cut someone off in traffic because they’d probably end up being your mother’s best friend’s first cousin’s gynaecologist.
We didn’t queue for parking at Llandudno beach and we certainly didn’t go to a house viewing where the agent starts off the conversation by informing you that 38 other people had already walked through the door and there had been two offers.
That sense of scarcity isn’t just anecdotal; the data underscores it. Cape Town’s residential market recorded an 8.5% annual price increase in the period to early 2025, far outpacing the national average of 5.2% and Johannesburg’s more modest 2.3% growth.
It is a testament to enduring demand and what we could politely call acute undersupply. (Read: to date, I still have not found a spot to put my bags, boxes and tiny beast down for 2026.)
Average property prices in the city now hover around R3.5m, with prime suburbs commanding as much as R31,000/m² — more than double Johannesburg’s R14,000/m² benchmark.
While it’s tough for locals such as myself looking to rent or buy, for the market as a whole the signals are overwhelmingly positive. South African real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been delivering some of the strongest total returns in the global real estate landscape, an impressive 46.2% year-to-date return since late last year.
That comfortably outpaces major developed markets where the global REIT index was up just 12%, the US at 9.2%, the UK at 10.3% and Australia at 22.9% over the same period. Analysts characterise this performance as a structural rerating rather than a temporary spike, with long-term annualised returns also significantly ahead of global peers.
From a communications perspective, this dual narrative — local stress and global strength — powerfully illustrates the gap between perception and structural performance. Everyday experiences — me and other locals trudging the hot streets of Cape Town in January — have meant viewings, bidding wars and affordability pressures.
This shapes how Cape Town residents feel about the market. (Much of it voiced, inevitably, as grumbles about tourists and flooding the city and property hunting over summer, hard currency in hand.)
The financial data tells a story of resilience and investor confidence that continues to attract capital, locally and internationally. To be clear, we want our city to thrive.
For communicators and leaders in the corporate and capital markets space, this underscores a core truth about modern markets: narrative matters as much as numbers. The subjective experience of housing scarcity and community identity can diverge sharply from headline-grabbing performance metrics, and balancing these narratives requires nuance. It’s the difference between talking about housing and talking about homes.
Ultimately, property markets don’t exist in spreadsheets alone. They exist in school catchment areas, in dogs that need a bit of garden, in neighbours you hope will become friends. Housing may be an asset class, but homes are emotional infrastructure and the way we talk about them shapes outlook, sentiment and trust.
As I keep scrolling property sites online, saving listings and quietly letting go of others, I’m reminded that optimism in markets is built not only on confidence in numbers but also on confidence in futures. If we want our cities and our portfolios to thrive, we need narratives that acknowledge both the balance sheet and the front door.
