After the Frenzy

• ChatGPT’s November 2022 explosion reaches Caribbean property desks; professionals face AI’s most important question yet
• Jamaica’s property market cools from its pandemic-era heights but structural resilience limits the correction
• The BOJ’s rate hiking cycle reaches its most consequential phase, sealing the mortgage affordability trap
• Global PropTech funding crashes from its 2021 pandemic peak as investor sentiment reverses sharply
• NHT mortgage activity softens as high rates and elevated prices narrow the addressable buyer base
• Blockchain’s role in Caribbean land registration attracts renewed discussion as digital infrastructure plans advance

The beginning of 2023 found Jamaica’s property market in a peculiar kind of suspension. The pandemic-era boom — that extraordinary period of low rates, pent-up demand, diaspora capital recycled by COVID restrictions into property investment, and a surge in domestic appetite for residential space in a world suddenly defined by the home — had ended. The forces that had inflated it had receded or reversed. But the market had not collapsed. Prices remained elevated. The supply deficit that had sustained values through the pandemic showed no sign of resolving. And beneath the surface of a market that appeared to be pausing, a question was forming that practitioners across Jamaica’s property sector were not yet fully equipped to answer.

That question had arrived in November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, and it had been sharpening ever since. The question was not, at its core, a technological one. It was a strategic one: in a world where artificial intelligence could perform a growing range of professional property tasks — from the drafting of listing descriptions to the analysis of title chains to the generation of market reports — what was the appropriate response for an industry in a market like Jamaica’s, where the digital infrastructure prerequisites for sophisticated AI deployment had not yet been built? Ignore it and risk being left behind by markets that moved faster? Invest in anticipation of an infrastructure that did not yet exist? Or find the intermediate path: build the foundations now, evaluate the tools as they mature, and position the sector for adoption when the conditions were right?

The Market Pauses, But Does Not Break

Jamaica’s property market entered 2023 showing the signs of a post-boom normalisation without the characteristics of a genuine correction. Transaction volumes were below their pandemic peaks. The sense of urgency that had driven buyer behaviour in 2021 and into 2022 — the fear of missing a rising market, the pressure of multiple offers, the willingness to compromise on specification in order to secure any available property — had dissipated. Sellers who had grown accustomed to quick sales and full asking-price offers were encountering longer marketing periods and more measured buyer behaviour. But prices, in most locations and most segments, were not falling in any meaningful way.

The structural explanation for the market’s resilience was the same in early 2023 as it had been throughout the preceding decade: Jamaica’s supply of residential property was inadequate to meet demand at any price point below the upper quartile, and this structural inadequacy provided a floor beneath values that market sentiment alone could not breach. A buyer choosing not to buy because of mortgage rate concerns did not reduce the underlying demand for housing; it merely deferred the expression of that demand, usually into the rental market. And as rental demand absorbed the buyers displaced by affordability constraints, rental yields rose, making property as an investment more attractive even at the elevated prices that made it inaccessible to first-time buyers.

ChatGPT: The Question Nobody Had Prepared For

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, had reached 100 million users by January 2023, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in recorded history. By the time the first quarter of 2023 was underway, no professional sector that depended on knowledge work — which was to say, effectively all of them — could avoid the question it had raised. For real estate, the question took a specific and practically urgent form: which aspects of the property transaction process that were currently performed by human professionals could be performed, at least in part, by AI tools; and what was the appropriate professional, regulatory and ethical framework for such a transition?

Caribbean property professionals engaging with this question in Q1 2023 were doing so largely through the lens of what North American and European markets were reporting. The evidence from those markets was both encouraging and unsettling. AI listing description tools were reducing the time that agents spent on marketing copy from hours to minutes, freeing capacity for higher-value client-facing activities. AI document review tools were enabling legal practitioners to process larger volumes of due diligence material more quickly than human teams could, reducing the cost and timeline of complex commercial transactions. AI market analysis tools were enabling brokers and developers to access the kind of granular, data-driven market intelligence that had previously been available only to the largest institutional market participants.

For Jamaica, the most important constraint on these possibilities was the data environment. AI tools performed at their best when trained on large volumes of structured, consistent, historically accumulated data. Jamaica’s property market had not yet produced such data in usable form. Transaction records were incomplete. Price data was inconsistent. The kind of granular, address-level sales history that automated valuation models in North American markets were built on simply did not exist in digitised form for the Jamaican market. Building the data infrastructure — which the NLA’s e-Titles programme would eventually deliver — was the prerequisite for AI deployment at market scale. Without it, Jamaica’s AI property journey would remain, necessarily, at the level of individual workflow tools rather than systemic market intelligence.

The Rate Cycle’s Grip on the Mortgage Market

The Bank of Jamaica’s rate hiking cycle, which had begun in late 2021, continued to tighten the mortgage market through the first quarter of 2023 with a persistence that reflected the BOJ’s commitment to its inflation-fighting mandate. Jamaica’s inflation rate, driven by imported commodity and energy prices as well as domestic food and utility costs, had peaked at levels that required a sustained monetary policy response. The policy rate had been lifted well above its pre-pandemic level, and commercial mortgage rates had tracked it upward, reaching levels that represented the most significant affordability barrier for first-time buyers in more than a decade.

The National Housing Trust’s mortgage portfolio reflected this environment in the softening of its new lending volumes through the quarter. The NHT’s subsidised mortgage products provided rate relief relative to the commercial market, but the combination of its own rate structure and the elevated property prices it had to work against still produced affordability outcomes that were challenging for a significant proportion of its eligible membership. Longer loan terms were being employed to stretch repayments to manageable levels, extending the period over which contributors would build equity and increasing the total interest cost of homeownership for those who could access it at all.

PropTech’s Reckoning

The global PropTech venture capital market was, by Q1 2023, in the midst of a correction that made the magnitude of the 2021 boom — a year that had seen global PropTech investment reach approximately US$22 billion at its peak — seem like a fever dream. VC firms that had deployed aggressively into property technology during the pandemic-era boom, when low rates and abundant capital had produced a compression of investment discipline, were nursing portfolios of underperforming assets and writing cheques with considerably greater caution. The sector’s most exposed companies — those with high burn rates, limited revenue, and business models dependent on the transaction volumes that rising rates had suppressed — were under severe pressure.

The correction had a cleansing effect that, paradoxical as it seemed in the moment, was necessary and ultimately healthy. The PropTech companies that survived 2022 and were navigating 2023 were, by and large, those that had built around genuine rather than speculative value propositions: tools that saved real costs, reduced real risks, and generated real revenue from real customers who found the product indispensable enough to pay for it through a funding winter. The correction was separating the wheat from the chaff, and the companies that emerged from it would be better placed to serve markets like Jamaica’s than the expansive, ambitions-first, proof-of-concept-later ventures of the boom years.

Blockchain and the Registry Conversation

The international conversation about blockchain applications in land registration was, by early 2023, sufficiently advanced to be influencing the thinking of Jamaican property law practitioners and policy officials with an interest in digital infrastructure. The precedents from Georgia, Rwanda, Dubai and a number of other jurisdictions that had deployed blockchain-based land registries demonstrated that the technology could, when implemented within appropriate legal and institutional frameworks, deliver significant improvements in the security, transparency and accessibility of land title records. The immutability of blockchain ledgers — the property that made records stored on them effectively impossible to alter without detection — had particular relevance for Jamaica, where title disputes and fraudulent transactions remained a persistent challenge.

Jamaica’s NLA had not adopted blockchain as the technical architecture for its e-Titles programme — the procurement process was evaluating a range of technical approaches — but the blockchain option was understood and was part of the informed policy conversation. The relevant question was not whether blockchain was technically capable of delivering a secure land registry but whether its implementation in Jamaica’s specific legal, institutional, and infrastructure context was the most practical and cost-effective approach. That was a question whose answer would emerge from the procurement process rather than from theoretical preference.

Looking Ahead: Building for the Next Cycle

As the first quarter of 2023 closed, the strategic imperative for Jamaica’s property sector was increasingly clear: the market was in a pause between cycles, and the pause was an opportunity. The next cycle — which rate cuts, e-Titles implementation, and the continued maturation of AI tools would eventually power — would reward those who used the pause to build capability, not those who waited for the environment to improve before acting. Digital infrastructure, data quality, professional AI literacy, regulatory framework development: these were the investments that would determine whether Jamaica’s property market entered the next cycle as a follower of international practice or, in the domains most relevant to its own development challenges, as a capable and self-directed participant.

The frenzy was over. The building should begin.

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