Jamaica’s March 2024 housing review: PM Holness announces NHT starter home programme; budget debate raises questions about delivery gaps and affordability.

Seven months at peak rates, a record tourism year and an election on the horizon: Jamaica’s housing market begins 2024 waiting for the turn that the data says is coming — but that has not yet arrived.

With the BOJ rate anchored at 7.00% and global monetary tightening at its most intense in a generation, Jamaica’s housing market in October 2023 is bearing the full weight of a monetary policy that has done its job — but not yet finished paying its price.

With the BOJ rate reaching its tightening cycle peak of 7.00%, Jamaica’s housing market in July 2023 is navigating a summer of suppressed demand, construction cost pressures and a tourism boom that is complicating long-term rental affordability in resort communities.

SVB’s collapse, Credit Suisse’s rescue and a rate cycle approaching its peak: Jamaica’s housing market in spring 2023 is navigating a global financial environment that has rarely been more turbulent — and a local affordability crisis that has rarely been more acute.

Inflation above 10%, a war in Ukraine that sent commodity prices soaring, and a rate-tightening cycle that has fundamentally changed the mortgage mathematics: Jamaica’s housing market begins 2023 taking stock of a bruising year and looking for reasons to believe the worst is over.

Rate hikes, commodity prices at multi-decade highs, and the UK’s mortgage market crisis as a cautionary tale: Jamaica’s housing market in October 2022 is bearing the full weight of a global inflation shock that has changed the economics of borrowing, building and buying.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, global inflation at multi-decade highs, and a BOJ rate cycle that is compressing mortgage qualification: Jamaica’s housing market in July 2022 is absorbing shocks from every direction simultaneously.

Six weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent commodity prices surging and the BOJ begins its rate-tightening cycle: Jamaica’s housing market in April 2022 is navigating the end of its most supportive monetary era and the beginning of a much more challenging one.

Omicron disrupts Jamaica’s tourism recovery just as 2021’s property boom reaches its peak: January 2022 marks the final months of the near-zero rate era that made homeownership more accessible than it had been in years — and a reckoning is approaching.