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SUMMARY
Is the property market in Colombia still growing? Yes in value, but not across the whole housing system: prices are still rising strongly while sales, launches, construction starts and financing remain weak.
New-home prices are running roughly 8.8% above a year earlier nationally. That is still strong appreciation, especially with consumer inflation closer to 6%.
The unusual part is that rising prices are no longer being supported by expanding activity. New-home sales fell 11.3% during the first seven months of 2026, while launches dropped 15.7% and construction starts 17.9%.
The longer view is less dramatic but still revealing. Colombia sold almost as many new homes over the latest 12 months as in the previous period, yet developers launched only about 81 homes and started construction on roughly 65 for every 100 homes sold.
This shrinking development pipeline helps explain why prices have stayed firm. Weak demand has not produced a large glut of new housing because developers are cutting future supply at the same time.
The 2025 housing recovery has clearly lost momentum. Sales and launches rebounded strongly last year, but the reversal in 2026 suggests much of that improvement was a recovery from a depressed base rather than the start of another expansion cycle.
Buyer behavior is also weaker than headline reservation figures suggest. VIS purchase withdrawals have risen sharply, showing that plenty of households can express interest in buying without ultimately being able or willing to complete the transaction.
Financing remains a major constraint. Colombia's policy rate is still 12%, and real housing-finance growth has recently been roughly flat, leaving mortgage payments difficult for many households even as the broader economy grows.
Price performance is increasingly local. Pereira, Manizales and Ibagué are currently appreciating faster than Bogotá, Medellín and Cartagena, so the national average hides a wide gap between individual urban markets.
The biggest upside risk is a recovery in credit before developers rebuild the housing pipeline. If mortgage conditions improve while construction starts remain depressed, more buyers could end up competing for relatively limited new supply.
For now, Colombia remains a rising property-price market rather than a broad housing boom. A genuine expansion would require sales, financing and construction to start improving together instead of prices doing almost all the visible growing.
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Is Colombia’s property market actually growing right now?
Colombia’s property market is still growing in price today, while the number of new homes being sold and built is moving in the opposite direction.
That split explains the market better than any single headline. DANE’s latest New Housing Price Index shows prices rising 2.41% in a single quarter. Compared with a year earlier, new-home prices were up roughly 8.8%. Apartments rose 2.37% quarter over quarter and houses 3.68%.
Sales tell a much weaker story. Camacol recorded 90,973 new-home sales during the first seven months of 2026, down 11.3% from the same period in 2025. Developers launched 70,873 homes, down 15.7%, while construction started on only 58,462, down 17.9%.
Stretch the window to 12 months and the picture becomes clearer. Colombia sold 168,478 new homes, almost unchanged from the previous 12-month period. Yet launches fell 4.2% and construction starts fell 11.6%.
So yes, Colombian residential property values are still rising. Calling the entire property market a growing market, however, gives the wrong impression now. Buyers are absorbing roughly as many homes as a year ago over the longer period, while developers are replacing that stock much more slowly.
| Colombia new-housing indicator | Latest reading | Change | What we see |
|---|---|---|---|
| New-home prices | National index | +8.8% YoY | Prices still rising strongly |
| New-home sales | 90,973 YTD | -11.3% | Recent demand has weakened |
| New launches | 70,873 YTD | -15.7% | Fewer projects coming to market |
| Construction starts | 58,462 YTD | -17.9% | Building activity falling faster |
| 12-month sales | 168,478 | -0.6% | Longer-term demand roughly flat |
Are property prices in Colombia still going up?
Yes, Colombian property prices are still climbing quite quickly, although the market has cooled from the double-digit increases seen a few years ago.
DANE’s latest national data put annual new-home price growth at about 8.8%. The latest quarter alone added another 2.41%, slightly faster than the 2.10% increase recorded in the same quarter of 2025.
Looking back helps put that number in perspective. Annual new-home inflation climbed from 7.65% in early 2022 to 12.4% at the end of 2023. It later eased toward 9%, and the latest reading remains in the high single digits.
The current pattern is persistent property-price growth rather than a fresh acceleration. An annual increase near 9% is substantial, especially when the rest of the housing market is struggling to generate more transactions.
General inflation also matters. DANE recently measured annual consumer inflation at 6.03%. The periods do not line up perfectly, so subtracting the two figures would give a false sense of precision. Still, new-home prices are clearly rising faster than the overall consumer-price basket. Recent housing appreciation therefore appears positive in real terms as well.
| Period | Annual new-home price growth |
|---|---|
| Early 2022 | 7.65% |
| End of 2022 | 8.78% |
| End of 2023 | 12.40% |
| End of 2024 | 9.07% |
| End of 2025 | 9.17% |
| Latest reading | ~8.8% |
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Did Colombia’s housing recovery already run out of steam?
Yes. Colombia’s housing rebound in 2025 was real, but the latest numbers show that it failed to turn into a sustained expansion.
New-home sales rose 12.4% during 2025, while project launches increased 15.3%. After the deep slowdown that followed the 2021–2022 boom, those numbers looked like the beginning of a proper recovery.
The first half of 2026 changed the picture. Camacol found sales falling 9.9% year over year, launches dropping 15.8% and starts falling 19.6%. The deterioration continued into July: sales for the first seven months were down 11.3%, launches 15.7% and starts 17.9%.
Camacol’s July dataset does require one caveat. An earthquake disrupted data collection in Risaralda, Caldas and Valle del Cauca, leaving Risaralda unavailable and the other two regions partially covered. That makes the exact July decline less reliable. It does very little to change the broader conclusion because weakness had already been visible across the first six months.
The recovery now looks more like a rebound from an unusually bad base than the beginning of another housing boom.
Are Colombians still buying homes?
Colombians are still buying plenty of homes, but lately the harder part has been getting buyers all the way from reservation to completion.
Camacol counted almost 168,500 new-home sales over the latest 12 months, only 0.6% fewer than in the previous comparable period. Demand at that level is still substantial.
The shorter-term data are much weaker, and buyer cancellations expose another problem hidden inside gross sales. Camacol data reported in 2026 show that VIS purchase withdrawals rose from 12,405 over a 12-month period in 2022 to 33,187 by mid-2026. That is an increase of roughly 168% in four years and the sharpest deterioration seen in the past decade.
In practice, many households are showing initial interest and then failing to finish the purchase. Higher monthly payments, uncertainty around subsidies, financing conditions and changes in the economics of VIS projects all play into that.
Consumer surveys point in the same direction. Fedesarrollo’s housing-purchase sentiment has recently remained deeply negative even when broader consumer confidence has looked much healthier. Buyers may feel better about their personal finances than they did during the worst of the slowdown and still decide that buying a home today is too expensive.
That makes Colombia’s demand picture more fragile than gross reservation numbers alone suggest.
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Is Colombia building enough homes for the demand that still exists?
No. Colombia is currently starting far fewer homes than buyers are absorbing, and the gap has become one of the defining features of the market.
Over the latest 12 months, Camacol recorded 168,478 gross new-home sales against 135,762 launches and just 108,850 construction starts. Our calculation gives roughly 81 launches and 65 starts for every 100 homes sold.
That gap is large. Sales exceeded launches by about 32,700 units and starts by almost 59,600.
Available new-home inventory stood near 160,300 units in July, down slightly from a year earlier. Around 59% of that stock belonged to the VIS segment.
As seen above, sales themselves are hardly booming. The unusual part is how much faster development activity has fallen. Developers are responding to weak financing, uncertain demand and difficult project economics by putting fewer homes into construction.
That is one reason prices can keep rising while the industry itself feels weak. Scarcity is doing more of the work than it used to.
| Latest 12 months | Homes | For every 100 homes sold |
|---|---|---|
| Gross sales | 168,478 | 100 |
| Launches | 135,762 | 81 |
| Construction starts | 108,850 | 65 |
| Sales minus launches | 32,716 | 19 |
| Sales minus starts | 59,628 | 35 |
Are developers in Colombia actually building less?
Yes, Colombian residential developers are building less right now, and the weakness shows up well beyond Camacol’s sales database.
DANE’s latest GDP figures show Colombia’s overall economy growing 3.5% year over year, so the housing slowdown cannot simply be blamed on the whole economy contracting.
Construction is much more uneven. Civil-engineering work has helped support the headline construction sector, while residential building has remained weak. Recent DANE production data showed residential building output falling roughly 7% year over year.
Permits also turned down sharply in the latest available month. DANE approved about 1.15 million square metres for housing, 22.6% less than a year earlier. Total licensed construction area fell 8.3%, even though non-residential approvals jumped 31.1%.
And yes, one month of permits can bounce around a lot. Housing approvals had risen strongly in some earlier months, including an increase of around 30% in May. What makes the current weakness more convincing is that permits, project launches, construction starts and actual residential output are all struggling at roughly the same time.
The economy is growing. Colombia’s homebuilding machine currently is not keeping pace with it.
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Does Colombia’s rising property market look like another boom?
No. Colombia currently has strong property-price growth without the buying frenzy, construction surge or easy financing we would expect from a real housing boom.
In an actual boom, strength normally spreads through the market: more people buy, developers launch more projects, construction accelerates, credit expands and prices rise alongside all of it.
Today, prices are doing most of that work. New-home values are rising close to 9% annually while recent sales, launches and starts are falling. Buyer cancellations have climbed dramatically, and residential construction output is down.
Limited supply therefore appears to be supporting prices more than surging demand.
That also changes what rising prices mean for an investor. A market where prices jump because buyers are fighting over an expanding number of transactions has very different economics from one where fewer projects reach construction and existing stock becomes harder to replace.
Colombia currently looks much closer to the second case.
Are high interest rates still hurting Colombia’s housing market?
Yes, expensive credit is still holding Colombia’s property market back, and financing remains one of the biggest reasons stronger economic growth has yet to produce a housing boom.
Banco de la República currently has its policy rate at 12%. For households taking long-term mortgages, that is still a restrictive financial backdrop.
There has been some improvement in housing credit. Real mortgage disbursements for home purchases rose 4.8% year over year in the first quarter of 2026. By the second quarter, however, real disbursements were roughly flat from a year earlier.
The longer perspective is also revealing. Camacol reported that 182,578 housing purchases received financing during 2025, an increase of only 1.6%. Around 71% of those disbursements went toward new homes.
Credit therefore stopped collapsing before housing activity did, but it has yet to become a strong growth engine. At current borrowing costs, plenty of households can want a home without being comfortable with the monthly payment.
That is probably the clearest reason a healthier Colombian economy and improving employment have produced such a muted housing recovery.
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Is affordable housing in Colombia holding up better?
Some parts of Colombia’s VIS market are holding up better in sales, but affordable housing is currently where several of the deepest problems are concentrated.
Over a recent 12-month period, total VIS sales were roughly stable while non-VIS sales fell modestly. Standard VIS excluding the very-low-cost VIP category performed better, with sales still growing.
Construction tells a harsher story. During the first half of 2026, Camacol recorded VIS starts falling 25.5%, launches dropping about 17% and sales declining about 7%. The VIP segment has been weaker still.
Buyer withdrawals add another layer. The roughly 33,000 VIS cancellations recorded over 12 months by mid-2026 were more than two and a half times the level seen four years earlier.
Government policy has also become more important. Changes around Mi Casa Ya subsidies and uncertainty over VIS pricing rules have made project economics and household affordability harder to predict. At the beginning of 2026, Camacol linked an extraordinary collapse in VIS starts to uncertainty around proposed changes to how VIS prices would be handled.
So affordable housing still has a huge pool of potential demand. Turning that demand into completed purchases and viable new projects has become much harder.
| VIS market indicator | Recent direction |
|---|---|
| First-half VIS sales | -6.6% |
| First-half VIS launches | -17.2% |
| First-half VIS starts | -25.5% |
| 12-month VIS cancellations | 33,187 |
| Increase in cancellations vs. four years earlier | ~168% |
Are Bogotá, Medellín and Cali property prices still rising?
Yes, property prices in Bogotá, Medellín and Cali are still rising, but the three cities are no longer moving at exactly the same speed.
DANE’s latest new-housing data show annual appreciation around 8.6% for Bogotá and Soacha, about 9.1% across the Medellín metropolitan area and roughly 7.8% around Cali.
Even those city averages hide major differences. Medellín municipality itself was closer to 5.6% annual growth while some surrounding municipalities moved faster. In Cali, DANE recorded very different increases depending on socioeconomic segment. Higher-end and middle-market properties can therefore behave quite differently inside the same city.
That variation is already large enough to affect investment results. Buying “Colombia” is impossible in practice; investors buy a specific apartment, at a specific price point, in a specific local market.
The national direction still helps, but city and neighborhood selection now matter far more than the headline Colombian price index suggests.
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Where are property prices rising fastest in Colombia?
Some of Colombia’s fastest property-price growth is currently happening outside Bogotá and Medellín, with Pereira, Manizales and Ibagué near the top of DANE’s latest new-home rankings.
Pereira recorded annual new-home appreciation of roughly 13.6%, Manizales 12.2% and Ibagué 12.0%. Barranquilla was around 11%, with Bucaramanga close behind at 10.6%.
Bogotá and Medellín remained solidly positive but below those smaller markets. Cartagena was around 6.3%, while Armenia and Popayán were closer to 4%–5%.
That gives us a spread of roughly nine percentage points between some of the fastest and slowest measured urban markets. For properties in the same country and measured over the same period, that is a big difference.
Faster appreciation does not automatically mean a better investment. A smaller market can jump because of limited new supply, shifts in the kinds of projects being sold or temporary local conditions. Still, the latest figures clearly show that Colombia’s largest and most internationally famous cities do not have a monopoly on price growth.
| Urban area | Approx. annual new-home price growth |
|---|---|
| Pereira | 13.6% |
| Manizales | 12.2% |
| Ibagué | 12.0% |
| Barranquilla | 11.0% |
| Bucaramanga | 10.6% |
| Medellín metro | 9.1% |
| Bogotá + Soacha | 8.6% |
| Cali area | 7.8% |
| Cartagena | 6.3% |
| Armenia | 4.5% |
| Popayán | 4.2% |
Could Colombian property prices keep rising even if home sales stay weak?
Yes, Colombian property prices can keep rising for a while even with weak sales because developers are cutting new supply almost as aggressively as demand has slowed.
The numbers explain the apparent contradiction. Roughly 168,500 new homes were sold over the latest 12 months, while fewer than 109,000 entered construction. Inventory for sale also edged down rather than building into a huge unsold stockpile.
Property sellers also have more room to wait than sellers of liquid assets. Developers can delay launches, owners can postpone a sale and projects can be held back until financing improves. Prices therefore adjust much more slowly than transaction volumes.
For now, that is helping Colombian home values remain firm.
There is a limit. If affordability remains poor long enough, demand could eventually weaken faster than developers can cut supply. The opposite scenario is more interesting: if mortgage conditions improve before construction recovers, more buyers would be competing for a pipeline that has already been cut sharply.
That second scenario is the main reason we would be careful about assuming that today’s weak sales automatically lead to lower property prices next.
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What would show that Colombia’s property market is really growing again?
Colombia would need sales and construction to start rising together before we would call the housing market genuinely healthy again.
Price growth has already passed that test. Demand and development activity have not.
The first thing to watch is sales. The latest 12-month decline is only 0.6%, so even modest improvement could push the longer trend positive. The recent year-to-date fall of 11.3% shows that we need more than one good month to believe a turnaround.
Construction is the harder test. With only about 65 homes starting construction for every 100 gross sales over the latest 12 months, developers are still behaving defensively.
Mortgage lending would also need to improve beyond the roughly flat real growth seen recently. At the same time, the 12% policy rate leaves little room to describe financing conditions as easy.
Finally, we would want buyer cancellations to come down. More reservations mean little if an unusually large number of households later abandon the purchase.
Once sales, completed financing and starts are all moving higher for several months, the description “growing Colombian property market” will fit much better.
So, is the property market in Colombia still growing?
Partly. Colombia’s property market is still growing strongly in value, but the wider housing market has stopped expanding for now.
Home prices give the bullish case plenty of support. New properties are worth roughly 9% more than a year ago nationally, and several urban markets are seeing double-digit appreciation. Recent price growth is also running ahead of general consumer inflation.
Underneath those prices, activity is much softer. Sales have weakened this year, developers are launching fewer projects and residential construction has fallen further. Buyer cancellations, especially in VIS housing, have reached unusually high levels. Mortgage credit has improved only modestly while the policy rate remains at 12%.
The supply side keeps this from being a simple bearish story. Colombia has fewer new homes entering construction than its current sales rate would normally require. That shortage is helping prices stay firm even while buyers struggle with affordability.
So Colombia is still a rising property-price market today, but describing it as a broad real-estate boom would be exaggerated.
The next move depends heavily on timing. If borrowing conditions improve before developers rebuild the housing pipeline, Colombia could move from today’s supply-constrained price growth into a stronger recovery, and prices could stay surprisingly firm in the process. If weak affordability keeps buyers away for much longer, price growth should eventually cool.
For now, values are growing. The housing market underneath them is still trying to recover.
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OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis investigates whether Colombia’s property market is still growing without forcing a complicated housing market into a single headline indicator. In property, growth can mean rising prices, more transactions, more construction, easier financing or a healthier development pipeline, and those measures are currently moving in different directions.
We therefore broke the question into prices, buyer demand, new supply, construction activity, financing conditions, affordability and regional performance. We used both the latest readings and rolling 12-month periods where the comparison helped separate a short-term movement from a broader change in direction.
We also compared indicators that represent different stages of the same housing cycle. Sales, project launches and construction starts were examined together, for example, because rising sales have a very different meaning when developers are expanding supply than when the construction pipeline is shrinking.
Where the evidence diverged, we kept that divergence in the conclusion rather than averaging it away. Rising prices alongside falling construction describe a supply-constrained market; rising prices alongside stronger sales, credit and building activity would point to a much broader expansion.
National housing data were cross-checked against city-level price movements, consumer inflation, housing-finance disbursements, the Banco de la República policy rate, consumer purchasing intentions and wider construction activity. This helped separate housing-specific weakness from changes in the Colombian economy as a whole.
The conclusion is based on the aggregation of these indicators rather than an artificial market score. We gave the most weight to recent, directly measured indicators that independently pointed in the same direction, while older figures were mainly used to establish context and judge whether the latest movement represented a genuine change in trend.
Key sources used for this analysis include DANE’s New Housing Price Index and historical IPVN series; DANE’s Consumer Price Index; Camacol / Coordenada Urbana’s July 2026 market tables; Camacol’s first-half 2026 housing-market report; Camacol’s review of the 2025 housing recovery; Camacol’s 2025 housing-finance analysis; DANE’s Housing Financing statistics; Banco de la República’s policy-rate series and July 2026 rate decision; DANE’s GDP statistics; DANE’s Building Census; DANE’s construction economic indicators; DANE’s construction-licence statistics; Fedesarrollo’s Consumer Opinion Survey; Camacol’s housing-market balance and buyer-withdrawal analysis; and MinVivienda’s 2026 VIS pricing consultation.
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