Author: Jamaica Homes News

Jamaica recorded 549 seismic events in 2025. Most went unfelt, but the figure is a reminder that the island builds, buys and insures on shaking ground.

Encouraging offshore signals have revived talk of a Jamaican oil future. The honest answer is that the island is a long way from any such thing, and its land should be watched regardless.

Guyana has become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies on the back of offshore oil. Jamaica cannot copy it, but the lessons for land, wealth and housing are real.

Across eleven years and seventeen IMF publications, a portrait of Jamaica emerges that is far more complex than either its critics or its cheerleaders allow. This is what the full archive actually reveals — about the economy, the property market, and the country’s future.

A complete analysis of Jamaica’s nineteen-month BOJ Payment System Data Bulletin series, June 2024 to December 2025. JAMCLEAR-RTGS volumes reflected sustained interbank activity, POS transactions grew as card adoption accelerated, and cheque usage declined structurally — together tracing the arc of Jamaica’s payment modernisation programme.

A complete analysis of Jamaica’s seventeen-month BOJ ABM Performance Bulletin series, December 2024 to April 2026. Hurricane Melissa triggered seven consecutive months of uptime non-compliance, the permanent loss of eleven Scotia Bank machines, and a 137-machine fleet refresh programme — the largest in the series. Rural uptime finally recovered above 95% in April 2026.

A complete analysis of Jamaica’s seventeen-month Bank of Jamaica Remittance Bulletin series, from December 2024 through April 2026. Fiscal 2025/26 became the first year to exceed US$3 billion in diaspora inflows, with corridor trends, regional benchmarks and housing market implications examined across the full dataset.

Housing Jamaica Today: Crisis, Aspiration and the Question of Home The years since 2020 have placed Jamaica’s housing challenge in sharp relief. A global pandemic reshaped where people wanted to live and how they worked. Prices climbed to levels that challenged even the aspirations of the formally employed. Climate risk sharpened. And the foundational questions — who can afford a home, whose tenure is secure, who owns Jamaica’s land — remained as urgent as ever, even as the island’s economy continued its long recovery and its property market caught international attention. The Pandemic Year: Dislocation and Unexpected Demand When Jamaica…

Jamaica’s minimum wage rises to $17,000 per week from July 1, 2026. For landlords, renters, and the broader housing market, the change has layered implications worth understanding.

From a hurricane-battered island clawing its way back to a landmark lawsuit over cannabis royalties, 2026 has tested every facet of the Marley inheritance. Today, on a street named for the island he never stopped singing about, a seven-foot statue of the man is unveiled in Liverpool — and the question is not whether the music endures, but what it is being asked to carry.

Kingston, Jamaica, 14 July 2026 The Urban Development Corporation has confirmed that plans are progressing for one of Jamaica’s largest public housing programmes in decades, with more than 20,000 homes proposed across Kingston, St. Catherine, St. Elizabeth and St. Ann. The initiative forms part of the Government’s wider housing and post Hurricane Melissa reconstruction strategy and is expected to gather pace following the establishment of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority. According to the Corporation, approximately half of the proposed homes will be built in southwest Jamaica, an area that suffered extensive damage during Hurricane Melissa. Officials say the programme…

Kingston, Jamaica, 13 July 2026 Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has released its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report for 2026, and the headline figure is stark: a household in the United States now needs an income of over $120,000 to afford the monthly payment on the median-priced home. In 2020, that threshold was $66,000. The near-doubling of the income required to access median homeownership in six years represents one of the sharpest deteriorations in housing affordability in modern American history. The report’s findings go well beyond a single statistic. They describe a system-wide failure of housing…

Kingston, Jamaica, 13 July 2026 Housing across the European Union is becoming more expensive, and it is doing so faster than incomes are growing. Residential property prices in the EU rose by an average of 5.1% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, while rental rates climbed 3.0%. Both figures outpaced the EU’s 2.3% inflation rate, meaning that in real terms, housing is consuming a larger share of household budgets across the bloc. Twenty-six of the twenty-seven EU member states reported rising house prices in Q1 2026. Finland was the only exception. The breadth of the increase is as significant…

Kingston, Jamaica, 13 July 2026 The US 30-year fixed mortgage rate averaged 6.58% on 12 July 2026, according to the latest data, continuing a period of remarkable stability that has now stretched across seven consecutive weeks near the 6.5% mark. The rate rose from 6.49% the previous week, a modest move that nonetheless reinforces the prevailing direction: the US rate environment is not easing. Fannie Mae forecasts the 30-year rate will average approximately 6.4% for the remainder of 2026. For those watching the US housing market from Jamaica, either as diaspora homebuyers or as observers of trends that eventually shape…

Kingston, Jamaica, 13 July 2026 Spain has emerged as Europe’s strongest-performing residential property market in 2026, with prices rising 13.5% year-on-year according to the latest data, and forecasters at CaixaBank Research projecting growth of over 10% for the full year. The performance places Spain well above the European Union average of 5.1% residential price growth recorded in the first quarter of 2026. The story behind Spain’s surge is not a speculative bubble driven by easy credit. It is a story of structural supply shortage meeting robust international and domestic demand. Spain needs roughly 200,000 new homes annually, and completions are…