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The third quarter of 2020 gave Jamaica three things it needed: a functioning, if partial, tourism industry operating under the…

The question the Jamaica property market faced entering the second quarter of 2021 was whether the diaspora-driven surge of Q1 was sustainable. The answer, as June closes, is unambiguous: demand has not moderated. What has moderated is supply. With KMA listing inventory at historic lows and prices up a further 10 percent on an already-elevated Q1 base, the market is now constrained not by buyers but by the absence of properties for them to purchase.

The second quarter of 2020 was unlike any other three-month period in Jamaica’s modern economic history: a full quarter without…

The first quarter of 2021 has produced price increases that property professionals are struggling to characterise with their existing vocabulary. KMA residential values rose by between 10 and 15 percent on a year-on-year basis, driven by a diaspora buying surge that has proved larger, more organised, and more financially capable than any prior overseas buyer wave in Jamaica’s recorded property history.

Jamaica’s first quarter of 2020 began as the island’s finest on record and ended as its most catastrophic in living…

Jamaica’s GDP contracted by approximately 10 percent in 2020, the worst annual performance since independence. Yet the KMA residential property market closed the year with prices marginally higher than they began it, remittances set a new annual record above US$2.7 billion, and a post-election transaction surge had absorbed the inventory that lockdown had held in suspension since March.

On 3 September 2020, Andrew Holness led the Jamaica Labour Party to an election victory of historic proportions, winning 49…

The Jamaica Labour Party’s September 3 general election victory by 49 seats to 14 — the largest parliamentary majority in post-independence history — provided the political clarity the property market had been waiting for since March. Within weeks of the result, conveyancing activity accelerated, developer pre-sales reopened, and diaspora buyers who had been holding inquiries in reserve began converting to transactions.

In the summer of 2019, Jamaica’s hotels were full, its beaches were busy, and its tourism industry was delivering what…

Jamaica’s GDP contracted by an estimated 10 percent or more in the second quarter of 2020 as the tourism sector recorded effectively zero stopover arrivals for the first time in the modern statistical record. The property market, frozen in Q1, has not recovered — but neither has it collapsed in the manner feared, sustained by a surge in diaspora remittances and a stubborn refusal among vendors to accept distressed prices.

We are writing this account of Jamaica’s second quarter of 2019 in April 2020, sitting in the ruins of everything…

Jamaica recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on March 10, 2020 — one day before the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic. Within a fortnight, borders were closed, the tourism sector had effectively halted, and a property market that had been operating at the highest level of activity in over a decade faced questions it had no framework to answer.

The conventional wisdom in Caribbean political economy has long held that fiscal frameworks unravel when elections approach: the primary surplus…

With GDP growth positive for an eighth consecutive year, tourism arrivals surpassing 4.5 million, and property values up across every major residential segment, Jamaica ends 2019 in a position no economist dared predict when the debt crisis peaked in 2013. The question entering 2020 is not whether the run can continue — but how much of the gain has become permanent.

There is a number that Jamaican finance ministers had been pursuing through five years of primary surpluses and painful fiscal…