Gabriel le Roux•1 week ago I am a director of a family-owned company that owns and operates a single six-bedroom property in Bishopscourt used for short-term letting. We operate transparently and formally: the company is VAT-registered, employs permanent local staff (housekeeping, gardening, maintenance), uses registered local agents, and pays all municipal accounts on this property. I support the principle of fair, accurate rating and I do not object to a registration system. I am, however, asking the City to amend specific mechanisms in the draft By-law and the linked Rates Policy framework that are, in their current form, inaccurate, disproportionate and likely to be counterproductive. My comments follow.Point 1: "Availability" is the wrong measurement basis - rate on actual use, not theoretical capacity.The framework classifies a property as commercial where it is listed as available for more than 50% of total annual room-nights, expressly measuring "listing availability on a booking platform rather than the number of nights that a property is booked" (City FAQ, para 4). This is a tax on capacity, not on use. Section 8 of the Municipal Property Rates Act permits categorisation according to the use of a property; a bedroom that stands empty on an unbooked night is not being used for commercial accommodation, generates no income, and consumes no municipal services beyond ordinary residential use. Availability data is also structurally unreliable: platform calendars default to open, listings are frequently left live during periods when an owner has no intention of accepting bookings, and minimum-stay rules mean "available" nights are often not bookable at all. Request: amend the measurement basis to actual let room-nights (occupancy), or at minimum a combined test in which availability alone can never trigger reclassification without a threshold of actual letting.Point 2: The 50% threshold operates as a cliff-edge with retroactive effect - provide for proportionality and prospective application.Under the framework, crossing the threshold by a single room-night reclassifies the entire property as commercial - at 2026/27 rates, a jump from 0.6428c to 1.5106c in the rand, an increase of roughly 135% - applied retroactively to the date the threshold was crossed within a rolling 365-day window. No other rating category in the City operates this way. The MPRA expressly contemplates multiple-use properties and apportionment. Request: (a) apply a pro-rata or apportioned rating that scales with the degree of short-term letting use rather than a binary flip; (b) make any recategorisation prospective only, effective from the next supplementary valuation after written notice to the owner, not backdated.Point 3: The By-law contains no objection or correction mechanism before rates are changed.Reclassification will be driven by third-party platform data over which the owner has no control and which the owner may never see. Platform data contains errors: duplicate listings, stale listings, blocked dates reported as available, and test listings. The draft By-law provides compliance and enforcement machinery against owners, but no procedure by which an owner is shown the data relied upon, can correct it, or can dispute a proposed recategorisation before it takes financial effect. The MPRA objection process (post-valuation-roll) is too slow and is not designed for this. Request: insert a mandatory pre-reclassification procedure: written notice of the data and calculation relied upon, a 30-day window to respond with corrections, and an internal appeal, before any category change is implemented.Point 4: The data-sharing provisions are overbroad and need POPIA-aligned limits.The draft requires sharing of availability data, occupancy data "and any other information relevant to its implementation," at a format and frequency the City may determine. An open-ended residual category of personal and commercial information is inconsistent with POPIA's minimality principle. Occupancy data in particular can reveal guest-level information. Request: define exhaustively and narrowly the data fields that may be collected (property identifiers and aggregate room-night counts should suffice for the stated purpose), exclude guest-identifying data entirely, and specify retention periods and permitted internal uses in the By-law itself rather than leaving them to discretion.Point 5: Criminal sanctions are disproportionate to administrative infractions.The draft makes it an offence - punishable by a fine or up to six months' imprisonment - to, among other things, fail to display a registration number on a listing. Imprisonment is not a proportionate response to an administrative labelling error, particularly where listing display is partly in the hands of the platform, not the owner. Request: adopt a graduated enforcement model: compliance notice with a cure period, then administrative penalty, reserving criminal sanction for deliberate, repeated evasion.Point 6: The transitional arrangements should be fixed in the By-law, not left to notice.The grace period and data-sharing commencement are left entirely to future public notice by the City Manager. Owners and platforms cannot plan against an undefined timeline. Request: specify a minimum 12-month grace period from promulgation in the By-law itself.Point 7: Economic effect: the framework taxes fixed costs regardless of income and risks driving the sector informal.A short-term letting property consumes the same municipal services as any residential property, yet would pay more than double the rates - a fixed cost payable whether or not a single night is booked. Formal operators like us - who employ staff, pay VAT, and use registered agents - will absorb this or pass it to visitors, reducing Cape Town's competitiveness as a destination; marginal operators will simply delist, churn listings, or move to informal channels, defeating the registration system's own objective. The City's FAQ states that its intention "is not to restrict or limit short-term letting." A 135% rates increase triggered by availability alone is, in substance, exactly such a restriction. The amendments requested above - occupancy-based measurement, proportionality, due process - would let the City achieve fair rating of genuinely commercial operations without penalising the formal, compliant part of the sector it says it wants to keep.I ask that the City revise the draft By-law and the associated measurement framework accordingly before submitting it to Council.Gabriel le RouxDirector, A and S Family Property Holding (Pty) LtdBishopscourt, Cape Town
