During 2022, housing sales prices in Mexico City surged between 9% and 10% compared to the previous year, the real estate online site Propiedades.com reported.
The firm’s real estate analyst Leonardo González said that 2022 was marked by uncertainty due to the high interest rates that in turn led to high mortgage costs.
The average price per square meter in the capital for buyers was 31,914 pesos for a house (US $1,652) and 46,033 pesos (US $2,383) for apartments — a jump in prices that was expected by Propiedades.com but nevertheless slowed down property purchases by Mexico City’s residents.
The neighborhoods with the greater demand during 2022 were Roma Norte and Roma Sur, both of which have gained notoriety in Mexico and in the world media as a place where older properties are being bought up by developers with deep pockets to convert into rental property for digital nomads and other foreign temporary renters.
The factors that drove regular homebuyers’ interest in the neighborhoods included their quality of life and the offered services, González said.
In the public housing sector, the Doctores neighborhood is showing a high performance, along with the neighborhoods of Del Valle, Nápoles, Extremadura and the residential Insurgentes corridor.
Heading south of Mexico City, the neighborhoods of San Jerónimo, Pedregal, Ajusco and Tlalpan show relevant growth and a consolidation process. González explained that this is part of a real estate cycle driven by new projects and increased demand.
Location was not as much a factor in 2022 as in previous years: although Mexico City is an attractive place to live, González said, it faces a continual challenge: to meet the needs of its population who are looking for housing options in other cities near the capital, like Querétaro, Puebla, and Toluca.
“This is not a new phenomenon. For the past four decades, we’ve observed that houses outside the metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico have ceased to be exclusively destined for holiday purposes…” González said.
More than 1 million properties located in the center of the country and close to Mexico City are currently listed on Propiedades.com, showing a continuous trend of people looking to move out of the city.
The home office trend that arose in response to the pandemic also caused contraction in corporate corridors like Polanco, a historically sought-after neighborhood. Without the need to live close to their workplaces, the number of people looking for residential spaces in the neighborhood has dropped.
In October 2022, Propiedades.com reported that the price for a apartment in Polanco contracted 12.4% in the first months of 2022.
In the middle-range housing sector, 2022 recorded a boom in new mortgages. However, the low-income segment contracted, creating a shortage of housing units that mainly affected the population with the highest housing backlog.
With reports from Forbes México and Propiedades.com
