In February, Bongani Mthethwa's two-bedroom apartment on the fourteenth floor of a Rosebank building grossed R112,000 from Airbnb and Booking.com combined. His total fixed costs — bond repayment, levies, municipal rates, a cleaning service at R450 per changeover — came to R23,400. He manages the unit remotely from a shared office in Braamfontein, using a smart lock system and property management software called Hostaway. He has never met most of his guests. He bought the apartment in 2022 for R1.85 million, having scraped together a deposit from two years of tutoring income. He now owns three units in the same building. "The bond was terrifying," he says. "The second was less terrifying. The third felt like a business."
The short-term rental market in Johannesburg has expanded dramatically since the easing of Covid restrictions, driven by a convergence of factors: the city's position as a continental business hub, the relative scarcity of well-managed boutique accommodation in nodes like Rosebank and Sandton, and the structural disadvantages of traditional long-term tenancies, where non-payment and protracted eviction proceedings have made many small landlords wary of twelve-month leases. The average nightly rate for a well-appointed two-bedroom apartment in Rosebank is between R1,800 and R2,600, depending on season. During the African Cup of Nations, which brought substantial visitor traffic to Johannesburg in early 2026, some operators reported nightly rates above R4,000.
Thandiwe Mnguni, a thirty-four-year-old financial analyst, took a different route to the same model. Rather than buying, she subleases: she holds long-term leases on four apartments in Melrose Arch and furnishes them for short-term listing. Her landlords receive market-rate rent regardless of occupancy. She absorbs the occupancy risk and captures the spread. "People think it is arbitrage," she says. "But it is management. The money is in the management — the quality of the listing, the photographs, the response time, the cleanliness, the welcome message." Her occupancy rates average eighty-two per cent across the four units. She has since taken on a part-time assistant to handle turnovers and guest communication, and expects gross revenue of R1.6 million for the current calendar year.
Everyone in this space knows the regulation exists. Everyone is waiting to see who it gets enforced against first.
Not everyone in the buildings is pleased. On the seventh floor of the Rosebank block where Bongani owns his three units, a retired accountant named Derek Bezuidenhout has submitted four formal complaints to the body corporate in the past eighteen months. "It is a hotel," he says, in the flat, precise tone of a man who has been angry for a long time. "There are strangers in the lifts every second day. I had a group checking in at two in the morning. This building was designed for residents." His most recent complaint — a twelve-page submission citing the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act and the City of Johannesburg's short-term rental by-law — is under review by the body corporate's managing agents. He is not holding his breath.
The regulatory question is real and, for now, unresolved. Johannesburg's short-term rental by-law, introduced in 2024, requires operators to register their units and obtain a certificate of compliance, and limits short-term rental to ninety days per year per unit — a provision that, if enforced, would eliminate the business model being practised by Bongani and Thandiwe entirely. Enforcement is sporadic. Both operators are aware of the by-law and both are, to varying degrees, in violation of it. "Everyone in this space knows the regulation exists," Thandiwe says. "Everyone is waiting to see who it gets enforced against first. So far, the city has other things to worry about."
The broader question the Joburg short-term rental boom raises is about the nature of housing as an asset class. When the same apartment yields three times as much per month as a long-term lease, the incentive structure of property ownership shifts, and long-term renters — including those in greatest housing need — are squeezed out of nodes that have become de facto micro-hotel precincts. Bongani Mthethwa is not unmoved by this argument. He grew up in a rented flat in Tembisa and knows what housing precarity feels like. "I am not unaware of the contradiction," he says, with the careful syntax of someone who has thought about this at length. "But nobody gave me the capital to start. I built it. And I intend to protect it."
