Jamaica’s tourism recovery completed in 2022, with arrivals approaching 2019’s record and revenue per room exceeding it. The Federal Reserve raised rates 425 basis points in a single year. FTX collapsed. The BOJ’s framework held. The island that nearly lost its dominant industry three years ago ended the year with that industry whole again.

Jamaica’s property market closes 2022 having resisted the correction that a combination of rising mortgage rates, elevated prices, and reduced buyer capacity had made plausible. Prices across the KMA are broadly flat on the year, the BOJ’s tightening cycle has reached or is near its terminal rate, and a tourism sector that has exceeded its 2019 record provides a floor of confidence beneath the market’s cautious surface.

The fourth quarter of 2021 brought Jamaica’s tourism industry to the threshold of the pre-COVID world. October and November arrivals, boosted by…

Jamaica’s residential property market has entered a holding pattern that reflects a rational response to irrational conditions: prices too high for the available buyer pool at current rates, rates too high for the qualifying income of the available buyer pool at current prices. The result is a market in stasis — not falling, not rising, but waiting for one of those two variables to move.

The third quarter of 2021 asked Jamaica’s tourism industry and its public health system to operate simultaneously at levels that, in any…

Six months into the BOJ’s tightening cycle, the Jamaica property market has answered the question that many feared: is it structurally resilient enough to absorb higher borrowing costs without a significant price correction? The answer, through the midpoint of 2022, appears to be yes — but the market that is emerging from the post-boom adjustment is materially more selective, slower, and demand-constrained than the one that closed 2021.

The second quarter of 2021 was the quarter when Jamaica’s tourism recovery stopped being a statistical curiosity and started being an operational…

The Bank of Jamaica’s decision to raise its policy rate in the opening months of 2022 — the second and third increases in a tightening cycle that began in late 2021 — has introduced the first genuine affordability pressure into a residential market that spent two years climbing without constraint. Prices remain well above pre-pandemic levels, but the buyer pool is visibly narrowing as borrowing costs rise.

In the first week of March 2021, a nurse at the Kingston Public Hospital held up a syringe for the cameras of…

Jamaica’s 2021 property market produced numbers that future historians of the sector will struggle to contextualise: residential prices up 25–35 percent over twenty-four months, remittances exceeding US$3 billion for the first time, and a diaspora buyer wave that fundamentally restructured the composition of the country’s residential ownership class. What comes next is the question the industry now faces with equal parts anticipation and apprehension.