Why more of my enquiries are coming from the UK this year.

My inbox has changed shape.

A year ago, the enquiries landing with me were split fairly evenly across the UK, the US and Europe. This year, the balance has tilted firmly toward Britain. Families in Surrey and Hampshire. Professionals in London. Second-home buyers in the Cotswolds and Edinburgh. People who have been watching Cape Town quietly for a long time and have decided the moment is now.

The easy explanation is the exchange rate. That is not the reason.

What has shifted

The British families reaching out to me are not chasing a currency play. They are making a calmer, slower calculation about where their children will spend the next ten years. They are weighing commute, school, security, space and weather against a specific life in the UK that they love but are quietly outgrowing.

The winter is long. The cost of space is rising. The second home in France is not being used the way it was. And the grandparents, the ones who already spend three months a year in Cape Town, keep mentioning it.

The real reason

Here is what I have observed. The British buyers coming to me this year are not running from anything. They are moving toward a specific version of their family life that they have already seen work for someone they know. A friend who did it three years ago. A cousin whose children are now at one of the Southern Suburbs schools. A former colleague who relocated to Constantia and sends photographs that look different to the ones from Fuham.

This is social proof moving slowly through a specific demographic. Once one family in a school year group makes the move, the conversations at the school gate shift. Other families begin to consider it properly. And a year or two later, the enquiries arrive in my inbox.

Why this matters for how I work

British buyers tend to want different things from the process than American or European buyers. They want detail. They want the school logistics mapped honestly. They want the security conversation had properly rather than skirted around. They want to know what their Saturday morning will actually look like in Newlands in winter, not just what the view is like from Clifton in summer.

The work is slower and more specific. It suits how I prefer to advise.

The global context

The Knight Frank 2026 Wealth Report describes a broader shift underneath what I am seeing in my inbox. The report notes that the global population of ultra-high-net-worth individuals continues to expand meaningfully each year, that wealthy buyers are significantly more mobile than they were a decade ago, and that their decisions about where to live are increasingly shaped by lifestyle, wellness and long-term fit rather than by status alone.

What my inbox shows me is the local expression of that global movement. UK families are not outliers. They are part of a documented pattern of internationally mobile, lifestyle-led buyers choosing cities that give them a different shape of life. Cape Town has quietly become one of those cities.

An example from a different industry

Private banking has a phrase for this kind of shift: a cluster of enquiries from a single source network. When a bank notices that three or four new client enquiries in a quarter come from the same professional circle, a golf club, a school committee, a law firm, they take that seriously. It is rarely a coincidence. It is a signal that something has been said, privately, that is moving through the network.

The same pattern is visible in my inbox right now. The names are different. The schools are different. The network is real. And the Knight Frank data suggests this particular network is one part of a much larger movement.

What I am telling British clients at the moment

Do not rush. The exchange rate will move again. The property market will move again. The version of Cape Town that suits your family does not change on either of those timelines.

Come. Stay for ten days. Walk the neighbourhoods properly, at the times of day your family will actually live in them. Meet the schools. Then go home and think about it for a month.

The best decisions I have watched British families make about Cape Town are the ones they made slowly.

A question to sit with

If you are reading this from the UK and Cape Town has been on your mind for longer than you have admitted out loud, what is it you are waiting for?

PS. If you would like a private conversation about what a relocation would look like for your specific family, my advisory process is on www.sophiegamborg.com