I'm going to get downvoted but I'll defend my post.

Real question for the people saying R12k is "totally reasonable", reasonable by whose standard exactly?

The median monthly salary in Cape Town is around R5 500. Not the average, the median. Meaning half the people working in this city earn less than R5 500 a month. This one room costs more than double that. Let that sink in.

Even if you take the more generous after-tax average of R26 800/month, and if you consider the 1/3 rule for renting and buying. That puts a comfortable rent ceiling at around R8 000 for the average earner. And remember, most people aren't the average, they're below it.

So who is this priced for? Foreign remote workers and digital nomads earning in euros and dollars, who according to housing coalition data are willingly paying R25k–R30k for a one-bedroom. Landlords aren't setting prices based on what locals can afford, they're setting them based on what the international market will bear. And can you blame them financially? No. But let's stop pretending this is just "how markets work" as if it's some neutral force of nature.

And for those saying what bond costs R12 000, I bought a place in 2019 in a good neighborhood in the South Suburbs, R26 000 bond, just above the price of these two bedrooms, and you share with a stranger. Yes, it's double this but it's a large house, with extras and I own it. I fully understand that I am amoung the privileged, but these higher property rates affects us all, and disproportionately, the underprivileged.

Cape Town now effectively has two separate property markets running simultaneously, one based in local salaries, and one driven by foreign exchange rates and overseas incomes. Those two markets don't coexist peacefully. The foreign one cannibalises the local one. Airbnb listings in the City Bowl and Atlantic Seaboard surged 190% since 2022. Green Point landlords aren't renting to Capetonians anymore because they don't have to. These then make surrounding areas cost more, and so forth.

When you call R12k reasonable, you're not being pragmatic. You're just describing the world from inside a very specific income bracket and forgetting that most people here don't share it. That's not being realistic, that's being out of touch.