Every nation needs a good slogan, and South Africa has a great one: “The Rainbow Nation”. It sounds like something you would put on a fridge magnet, and it mostly lives there now, alongside a Table Mountain postcard and a magnet shaped like a Springbok. But the phrase still does a bit of quiet work whenever a family gathers for Sunday lunch and somebody brings up the house. Because if there is one truly national sport in South Africa, ahead of rugby, ahead of load-shedding jokes, it is arguing about property. Who should buy where? Who is “throwing money away” on rent? Who gets Ouma’s place at the coast, and whether anyone has actually asked Ouma?

Semigration has become the modern version of that argument, dressed up in moving boxes. Cape Town versus Johannesburg is basically the country’s long-running national derby, played out one U-Haul at a time. The Cape pitch is mountain, sea, and the smug certainty of people who feel they have already arrived somewhere, backed up by a residential market that has been growing at roughly 8.5% a year against a national average closer to 5.2%. The Joburg pitch is hustle, opportunity, and the equally smug certainty of people who think arriving is for people who have stopped trying, backed up by tech and finance salaries that run around 6% ahead of Cape Town for the same job. Both sides are unbearable at a braai. Both sides are also, occasionally, right. Interestingly, about a quarter of the people who leave Cape Town do not head overseas or into semi-retirement on a smallholding, they move to Johannesburg (Wise Move, 2025), which rather ruins the story either city likes to talk about “winning.”

What nobody says out loud at the braai is that the real decision being made is not really about a city at all. It is about which story of ‘home’ a person wants to inherit, and increasingly, a later and pricier one. First-time buyers are getting older before they buy, not younger, and they now make up close to half of all new home loan applications (ooba, 2025). Buyers between 20 and 35 are also paying noticeably more for that first home, averaging just under R1 million, than retirees buying their first property for the first time at closer to R730,000. Some families are coast people, the way other families are rugby people, it is simply in the water. Others treat wherever the opportunity is as home, which is presumably why Gauteng alone still accounts for close to half the country’s new affordable home loans.

Ubuntu gave this country a lovely old idea: “I am because we are.” In context this means your wealth was never really only yours, it belonged to the people around you too. It is a nice thought to have while filling in a bond application alone at your kitchen table wondering why your parents did not mention any of this sooner.

Because that is the twist nobody’s marketing slogan warned anyone about. While young South Africans are busy having the coast-versus-Joburg argument, a much bigger and much quieter handover is happening one generation up. More than 30% of the country’s high-net-worth individuals are already over 60, and one estimate puts the Gen X inheritance question alone at somewhere near R1.5 trillion moving through the system in the years ahead. Parents and grandparents who spent decades building up a bit of property, a pension, maybe a holiday flat, are getting older, and all of it is starting to shuffle toward children who have very different ideas about risk, rent and whether staying in one place for thirty years is even a normal way to live. Most families never actually discuss this. They discuss the weather in Cape Town instead, because it is a much easier fight to have, and the global pattern on what happens when families don’t have that conversation is fairly blunt: roughly 70% of family wealth doesn’t survive to the second generation, and about 90% doesn’t make it to the third.

This is really where the wealth industry earns its keep, or should. Not by declaring a winner in the coast-versus-inland derby, and certainly not by pretending property is only ever a rational, unsentimental asset class. A house in this country almost always comes with feelings attached, whoever’s family it belongs to. The useful conversation is the boring, unglamorous one: what does Mom and Dad’s plan actually look like, does anyone know it, and does it line up with the very real decision their kids are about to make about where to live and how to buy? Get that conversation going before the property one, and the semigration argument stops being quite so loaded. It becomes what it always should have been. A genuinely fun fight about mountains and traffic, instead of a proxy war about money nobody wanted to mention first.

A demonstration, because even a light argument should show its working:

Click here for an interactive model called “The Semigration Ledger”. Pick a city, pick a starting property value, and watch what a decade of Cape Town-style capital growth looks like next to a decade of Joburg-style growth, and next to simply renting and investing the deposit instead. The gap by year 10 tends to be bigger than either side of the braai wants to admit.

This piece reflects my own personal views and does not constitute financial or investment advice.

References

1. Lightstone residential property price index, 2025. ↩
2. Wise Move, 2025 South Africa Migration Report. ↩ ↩2
3. ooba Home Loans, Q1 2025 market data. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
4. Ninety One, high-net-worth client demographic data. ↩
5. Property Professional, commentary on the South African “great wealth transfer.” ↩
6. Widely cited intergenerational wealth transfer research (commonly referenced as the “70/90 rule” across global wealth management literature). ↩