Gauteng's ultra-wealthy are keeping their Johannesburg mansions and buying R60 million Cape Town retreats rather than choosing between the two cities

South Africa's wealthiest Gauteng residents are no longer choosing between Johannesburg and Cape Town. They are buying both, and they are not selling either, according to a new report from Pam Golding Properties that captures a meaningful shift in how ultra-high-net-worth South Africans are structuring their lives and their property portfolios.

The report, titled "Rise of the Hybrid Lifestyle Among Johannesburg's Affluent Homebuyers," describes a growing pattern in which buyers who might previously have semigrated fully to Cape Town or another coastal destination are instead maintaining their Johannesburg primary residences and adding a second home on the coast or along the Garden Route. Andrew Golding, CEO of Pam Golding Properties, discussed the findings on The Money Show on April 29.

The numbers involved are significant. Primary luxury residences in Gauteng's established upmarket suburbs, including Melrose and Athol, are trading at R20 million to R40 million ($1.08 million to $2.16 million) and above. Cape Town secondary homes for buyers in this bracket start from R60 million ($3.24 million) and move considerably higher from there.

"Johannesburg remains the irreplaceable business and family hub for the bulk of these high-net-worth individuals, even those with Cape Town retreats or KZN North Coast getaways or Plett and Knysna on the Garden Route," said Mariël Burger, Pam Golding's regional head for Gauteng Metro.

The hybrid model is enabled by South Africa's airport infrastructure, which makes the Johannesburg to Cape Town route one of the busiest domestic flight corridors in Africa. Burger described clients and colleagues with "increasingly fluid lifestyles," splitting their working weeks between cities with the ease that the route allows. One Pam Golding executive cited in the report runs this arrangement himself, commuting bi-weekly to Cape Town while keeping Johannesburg as his primary base.

Why Joburg is not being abandoned

The semigration narrative, which has dominated South African property commentary since the post-COVID period when remote work made the Cape Town lifestyle more accessible to Gauteng professionals, always implied a binary choice. Sell the Sandton house, move the family to Constantia, enroll the children in a new school.

For buyers at the very top of the market, that logic has not held. The decision to leave Johannesburg entirely carries costs that extend well beyond property values: established schools, social networks, family ties and business relationships that do not transplant as easily as a title deed. Golding said those factors keep the wealthiest Gauteng residents anchored to the city even as they simultaneously expand their footprint elsewhere.

The bifurcation in the market is also visible in the properties themselves. Joburg's top end, which Golding said was capped around R20 million for a long time, is beginning to move.

"We're starting to see the beginning of a trend where those large properties are naturally available to be redeveloped and where buyers are seeing value there as the market starts to move," he said. "For a long time, the top end of the Joburg market was around R20 million, but that is starting to move."

He added that buyers with an eye on value are now looking at Johannesburg's top end and calculating that there is upside left relative to Cape Town prices. "Discerning buyers are picking up on this and seeing a lot of upside in terms of where that market's still got to go to catch up with, for example, some of the Cape Town prices."

Cape Town's undiminished pull

None of this signals a slowdown for Cape Town's luxury market. Golding was unequivocal on that point. "The Cape Town market continues to be strong, fuelled I think by what's happening globally, and particularly from a South African perspective. We are now a desirable destination, and Cape Town and the Western Cape coast and the Garden Route in particular."

Cape Town has emerged over the past 5 years as one of the world's most actively sought luxury property markets, driven by a combination of factors that have made it attractive to buyers from Johannesburg, from Europe and from the broader African diaspora. The city's infrastructure has remained more reliable than Gauteng's through South Africa's extended period of electricity supply instability. Its international connectivity has improved. Its governance reputation under the Democratic Alliance administration has made it a preferred base for internationally mobile wealthy South Africans who want to maintain a first-world standard of infrastructure alongside their business commitments.

The consequence has been price growth that has dramatically widened the premium Cape Town commands over Johannesburg. The R60 million entry point for the kind of coastal property that wealthy Gauteng buyers are now acquiring as second homes represents a level that would have seemed extreme a decade ago, and the Pam Golding report suggests the ceiling is not yet visible.

What the hybrid lifestyle trend reveals, beyond the property market dynamics, is the adaptability of South Africa's wealthiest households to a new way of organising life and work. Johannesburg gives them proximity to business, education and family. Cape Town, the Garden Route or the KZN North Coast gives them the lifestyle margin that wealth is ultimately supposed to buy. The wealthy of Gauteng have decided they do not need to trade one for the other. They are buying the spreadsheet instead of making the choice.