The City Wants Your Number
Pretoria has gone quiet on the rules for your spare room. Cape Town hasn't, and it wants comment by the fifth.
By Puff 'n Post | Hosts & Listings
The thing with a date on it
The City of Cape Town has put out a Draft Short-Term Letting By-Law and it is open for public comment from 5 August until 5 October 2026.
Most people letting a room in that city do not know this. That is not a criticism of them. Nobody sends you a letter. It went into the consultation machinery in August, got a bit of coverage, and has been sitting there since while everyone got on with the season. This is their method, the slimy fuckers.
What it wants, in the City’s own words, is this. You register the property with the City and it issues you a number. You display that number publicly on the listing, where a guest can see it. The platforms share availability and occupancy data on registered properties with the City. And if the place is used or available for short-term letting more than half the total annual room nights, it crosses the commercial threshold and is rated as commercial accommodation. The rates change lands on 1 July 2027 and the City works out who falls where from the register. And then collects.
Forget fines for a moment. The enforcement is cleverer than that and it is in the City’s own FAQ. Booking platforms will be obliged to remove any listing that does not display a valid City-issued registration number.
So there is no inspector at your gate and no summons in your post box. There is just a listing that stops existing. You are not fined, you are delisted, and the platform does it for them. Always with the fucken penalties, enough, except this one does not even need a penalty clause.
Comment is open until 5 October. Email STL@capetown.gov.za, or use capetown.gov.za/haveyoursay, where the draft and an executive summary sit, or drop something written into a subcouncil office or a library. You can do it yourself, in your own words, about your own house. It does not want to be long.
And the thing without one
On 13 March the Minister of Tourism gazetted a draft Code of Good Practice for Short-Term Rentals under section 8 of the Tourism Act 3 of 2014. Gazette 54320, General Notice 3824. We have written about it before. Comment ran sixty days and closed on 12 May.
It asks you to behave well. Tell your guests about the by-laws and the body corporate rules. Put a fire extinguisher somewhere sensible and say where it is. Keep the place up to health and safety standards. Pay your income tax, your VAT and your tourism levy. Carry liability insurance. Have somebody reachable when a guest or a neighbour needs reaching. Support local business. Guests get their own list, mostly about noise and damage and not lying about how many of you there are.
What the Code does not contain is a registration requirement. Or a number you must display. Or an obligation to hand anybody your availability data. Or a cap of any kind.
That is worth holding onto, because it is the whole shape of this thing. The national document, the one with the Minister’s name on it, asks you to be a good neighbour and asks nothing of you that anyone could enforce. It says so itself. Non-binding, interim, pending an amendment to the Tourism Act that has not happened.
And since comment closed, nothing. No outcome, no timetable, not even a line saying the submissions are being read and here is roughly when. We checked the department’s newsroom and we can tell you it has published about other things in that time. It simply has not published about this.
One hundred and twenty-seven days. The submissions are in a drawer in Pretoria and somebody in that building knows what is in them.
About the ninety days
Somebody will tell you the State is going to cap you at ninety nights a year. This comes up at every braai where two people who let cottages get talking.
It is not in the Cape Town draft and it is not in the national Code, it comes from Parliament.
On Tuesday 17 March, four days after the Code was gazetted, the Portfolio Committee on Tourism sat from nine until one on short-term rentals. Eighteen members across eight parties. The department came, led by its Director-General. The industry body came, the South African Short-Term Rental Association, and told the committee that short-term rentals make up roughly half the accommodation sector in this country, that a good part of that half is run by women and by people who were locked out of the trade for most of a century, and that a proposed ninety day cap would finish a lot of them off.
So the cap is a warning from the people it would land on about something that might come. Not a rule. Anybody telling you otherwise hasn’t read the papers, and there are enough real things in those papers to worry about without inventing one. Snakes, I tell you.
Two details from that morning that nobody has reported.
The association’s presentation was not circulated to members before the meeting. They sat there and were briefed on the size and shape of half the country’s accommodation sector off a document they had not seen, with an undertaking that it would be sent round afterwards.
And Parliament’s own schedule for that day does not say the association was coming. It says Airbnb. Same subject line, word for word, different body in the chair opposite. We do not know what happened in between (shenanigans, anyone?). Perhaps they pulled out. Perhaps both came and the minute records one. Perhaps the schedule was written loosely. It is worth someone asking, because a platform’s account of this sector and an association’s account of it are not the same document, and the department’s whole posture may have been set in a room where one of them turned up. It is the nature of the beast. Over-paid apathy.
The rest of it is better than you would expect. Five parties asked reasonable questions. The ANC members went at the tourism levy, the silence on tax, the missing data, whether any of it could actually be enforced, and who gets included and who gets left out in the places that never got a look in. The DA member wanted to know how anyone would measure whether it worked, what municipalities were meant to do with it, what a safety inspection would involve. The EFF member asked what protects a small operator and what a guest can do when something goes wrong, given the thing is voluntary. The MK member asked about jobs and about money leaving the district it was earned in.
What happened next
The committee met again seven days later, on 24 March. The subject was training in the hospitality sector.
Then 21 April, on the department’s annual performance plan. Then 5 May, on the budget vote. Then 19 May, a week after comment on the Code closed, on the Tourism Equity Fund. Then 2 June, on a study about dual pricing. Then 9 June, on growing tourism, with the Western Cape government, the City of Cape Town and Wesgro in the room. Then three more sittings in August. Bullshit baffles brains.
Short-term rentals have not been back on that committee’s agenda since 17 March.
One hundred and eighty-three days. The evidence was heard, the questions were good, and the file was closed the following Tuesday and never reopened. Huh?
Which leaves you here
Two levels of government are writing rules for the same spare room and they are not doing it together.
Put the two documents side by side. The national one asks you to be considerate and asks for nothing you could be made to produce. The municipal one wants you on a register, wants the number on your advertisement, wants your availability data, and attaches a rates consequence with a date in 2027. One of those is a letter to the sector. The other is a filing system. Measuring again, with an objective, to put the bite on you for more of your bank.
The letter came first, went out for comment, closed in May, and has not been heard from. The filing system arrived in August and closes in October. Other metros will look at Cape Town and borrow what they like, because that is what metros do, and there is currently nothing national for them to borrow instead.
None of this is a conspiracy. It is just what happens when nobody is co-ordinating, and it is how a country ends up with rules that a reasonable person cannot comply with because they contradict each other or because one of them has not been published yet.
A hotel chain copes with this. A hotel chain has somebody whose job includes reading gazettes, and a lawyer who picks up the phone. A guesthouse with three rooms has one person doing the beds, the breakfast, the books and the replies, then rushes off to fetch kids from school, and she finds out about a by-law on her phone at half past ten at night after the last guest has gone up, if she finds out at all. Registration, a data obligation and a rates reclassification in the same document are three items on a corporate to-do list and one very large problem for her. Penalties incoming.
If her house rules mention cannabis she has more to think about than most, because she is already the one being careful about what gets written down and who is told what.
What we actually want, and you can see where the reporting stops
Everything above is what the papers say. This next bit is us.
We do not think a person should need permission to let a room in their own house. Register the business for tax, pay what you owe, keep the place from burning down, which any host worth the name does anyway because there are people asleep upstairs trusting you. Past that the State’s interest should run out.
A register is a list. A number on the advertisement makes the list public. Availability data handed to an official makes the list useful. And a rates category that turns a house into a commercial building on the strength of how many nights it stood open is not a safety measure by any stretch, it is a revenue measure with a safety measure’s manners.
We say the same thing about the plant, for the same reason, and we have said it ever since the Constitutional Court did. Look at what a person does, at the point where it touches somebody else. Don’t count what they’ve got. That is the trouble with weighing a man’s dagga in grams and it is the trouble with counting a woman’s room nights, and it is the same instinct both times even though it arrives from different departments. The State weighs them, measures them, in the hope that some may be found wanting, and then the penalties.
That is an argument about what the law should be. It is not advice to ignore a by-law, and if the Cape Town one passes it will be law and it will apply to you.
Before the fifth
Comment on it if you let in Cape Town, to STL@capetown.gov.za or at capetown.gov.za/haveyoursay, before 5 October. Short is fine. Yours will be worth more than the association’s because an association can be argued with over tea and biscuits, and a person who exists cannot.
Read it even if you let somewhere else.
And write one line to the national department asking what happened to the submissions on the Code and when there will be an answer. One line each, from enough people, eventually becomes a file somebody has to deal with.
When either document lands properly we will publish what it actually says, read off the gazetted text rather than off somebody’s summary of it, with the parts we are not sure about marked as parts we are not sure about. That is the whole offer.
CannaStaySA is an information and advertising directory. Over eighteen only. We do not sell cannabis, supply it, broker it, or help anybody else do any of that, and there is nothing on this page that tells you where to get any. What we do is tell a traveller who has a bed, in which town, on which night, and let them talk to you directly.
Make it before they take it, Selah.
