Could Gauteng agents and investors gain from semigration?

Gauteng is becoming an ever more important destination for interprovincial movers. Will that put rocket fuel into its rental market?

The new 2026 Wise Move Migration Report shows that more movers are headed to Gauteng. Moves from the Western Cape to Gauteng were up 58.6% in 2025, and moves from KwaZulu-Natal to Gauteng were also 54.0% higher. According to Wise Move, the numbers represent a rebalancing towards Gauteng.

But despite all the newcomers, rental growth in Gauteng has been fairly unimpressive. According to the PayProp Rental Index, the province’s growth hasn’t beaten the national average since Q3 2023. In Q1 2026, rents grew by 4.3% against a national average of 4.7%.

That’s because movers are leaving Gauteng even faster than they’re arriving, and they’re mostly heading to the Western Cape: the only one of SA’s three biggest rental markets with significant net positive semigration. While rents in Gauteng have remained stubbornly below average, the Western Cape experienced above-average rental growth in all four quarters of 2025.

Movers are also willing to make sacrifices to get there. Wise Move points out that movers from Gauteng to the Western Cape were more likely to downsize than upsize, while the opposite was true for those going the other way. House prices and rents in the Western Cape are the highest in the country, while Gauteng has the second highest house prices (according to ooba) and third highest rents, averaging R9 600 a month in Q1 2026.