Jamaica’s fourth quarter of 2020 brought a winter season unlike any the island’s tourism operators had managed before: a resilient corridor that…

Three quarters into the most extraordinary year in Jamaica’s modern property history, the market shows no structural sign of deceleration. Prices across the Kingston Metropolitan Area have risen between 20 and 30 percent on a year-on-year basis. Diaspora buyers remain the dominant force. And a construction sector operating near capacity cannot build fast enough to address a supply deficit that deepens with each quarter.

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

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 a functioning…

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 memory. January…

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 of 63…

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.