Are foreigners still buying property in Medellín?

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Are foreigners still buying property in Medellín?

Yes. Foreigners are still buying property in Medellín today, and Antioquia remains one of Colombia’s strongest markets for foreign home buyers.

Camacol’s latest detailed census of international home sales gives us the clearest number. Foreigners who did not live in Colombia bought 3.28% of new homes sold in Antioquia in its November 2025 measurement. Only Magdalena, at 7.31%, and Bolívar, at 3.67%, ranked higher.

That 3.28% needs some context. It covers new housing projects tracked by Camacol, rather than every resale apartment changing hands in Medellín. We therefore cannot use it as a perfect citywide count. But it gives us something much more useful than brokerage anecdotes: a consistent measurement showing that genuine foreign buyers are still unusually present in Antioquia.

Recent activity also points in the same direction. At Camacol Verde 2026, the industry group said roughly 14% of new homes sold in Medellín and Antioquia were going to people living abroad. That larger figure includes both foreigners and Colombians living overseas, which explains why it is so much higher.

So foreign buying is still very real. The numbers simply become much smaller once we separate actual foreigners from the Colombian diaspora.

Do foreigners really buy one in four homes in Medellín?

No. Claims that foreigners buy roughly one in four Medellín homes mostly come from mixing foreigners with Colombians who live abroad.

This distinction changes the story considerably.

BBVA Research previously highlighted data showing that around 25 out of every 100 homes sold in Medellín were being bought from outside Colombia. That number circulated widely because it showed how international Medellín’s housing market had become. But “buyer living abroad” and “foreigner” are different categories.

Camacol now measures the two groups separately. Across Colombia, foreigners represented 2.1% of its November 2025 new-home sales, while Colombians living abroad accounted for 10%. In non-VIS housing, which covers the higher-priced market most relevant to international investors, the difference was even bigger: foreigners represented 4%, compared with 15.6% for Colombians overseas.

Recent reporting around Medellín has sometimes continued to call the entire group “foreign buyers,” even when the underlying Camacol number includes Colombians abroad.

For anyone trying to understand whether Americans, Canadians or Europeans are taking over Medellín’s housing market, that shortcut creates a badly inflated impression.

Is foreign buying in Medellín still growing?

Probably not at the pace people imagine. The latest data suggests that foreigners remain active in Medellín, but their share has softened while purchases by Colombians abroad have grown much faster.

Camacol measured foreign non-residents at roughly 2.6% of national new-home sales in its first major international-buyer census in July 2024. That share was around 2.4% in April 2025 and 2.1% by November 2025.

Antioquia shows the same mild cooling. Foreigners represented about 3.8% of measured sales in April 2025 and 3.28% in November.

Those movements are too small to call a collapse, especially because the surveys are snapshots rather than a perfect transaction series. Still, the direction is worth taking seriously. We do not see evidence that actual foreign buyers are taking a larger and larger piece of the market every year.

Meanwhile, Colombians abroad have gone the other way. Their national share rose from 4.7% in the July 2024 census to 10% in November 2025.

International demand is therefore growing faster than foreign demand itself. These days, the Colombian diaspora is doing much more of the heavy lifting.

Who are the foreigners buying property in Medellín?

American buyers dominate the foreign side of Colombia’s housing market, and Medellín has an unusually large pipeline of Americans who already know the city.

Camacol found that 68.1% of foreign non-resident home buyers in its latest census came from the United States. Spain contributed another 14.6%. Canada was far behind at 3.8%, followed by Venezuela at 3.3% and Germany at 2.4%.

Americans and Spaniards alone therefore represented almost 83% of measured foreign purchases.

Medellín’s visitor data lines up remarkably well with that pattern. The city’s tourism intelligence system counted 310,517 visitors from the United States in 2025, making America its biggest international source market by a wide margin. Spain also ranked among Medellín’s ten largest markets.

That overlap helps explain why US buyers show up so frequently in local real-estate agencies. Medellín already has hundreds of thousands of Americans passing through the city, renting apartments, returning several times and learning individual neighborhoods before some eventually decide to buy.

Tourism does not automatically turn into property purchases, obviously. The useful point is that Medellín keeps replenishing a very large pool of potential buyers from the exact country that already dominates foreign home purchases.

Where are foreign buyers concentrating in Medellín?

Foreign property demand in Medellín is heavily concentrated around higher-priced southern neighborhoods and the corridor toward Envigado, rather than being spread evenly across the city.

Camacol’s work on international housing demand has repeatedly found stronger foreign interest in higher-value non-VIS projects. That fits what we see on the ground in El Poblado, the southern Medellín hills and nearby Envigado, where projects are easier to market internationally and the housing stock suits buyers arriving with dollar incomes.

El Poblado is also a major market even before we consider foreigners. La Lonja recorded 1,915 new homes sold there during 2025. Medellín as a whole sold 6,371.

That means El Poblado alone accounted for roughly 30% of Medellín’s new-home sales.

We cannot say that foreigners bought those 1,915 apartments. The available data does not identify nationality at that neighborhood level. But it explains why foreign demand can feel huge in El Poblado while remaining only a few percent of Antioquia-wide transactions.

A buyer walking around Provenza, Manila or parts of Las Lomas is seeing one of the most internationally exposed slices of the entire market. That experience tells us very little about what is happening in Robledo, Buenos Aires or most working- and middle-class neighborhoods.

Are foreigners mostly buying huge luxury apartments in Medellín?

No. The typical foreign purchase looks much more like a compact upper-market apartment than a giant luxury property.

Camacol measured the average non-VIS home bought by a foreign non-resident at 70.6 square meters in November 2025. It had an average of only 1.85 bedrooms.

Foreigners actually bought smaller non-VIS homes than local residents. Colombians living in Colombia averaged 84.6 square meters and 2.16 bedrooms.

That 14-square-meter gap is revealing. Foreign buyers are often choosing smaller properties in more expensive locations, rather than using their purchasing power simply to buy much more space.

The average profile fits a one- or two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood with strong international appeal surprisingly well. Those units work for part-time residents, couples, solo buyers and short-term-rental investors.

The eye-catching penthouses and multimillion-dollar villas exist, of course. They are just a poor picture of what the average foreign buyer is actually purchasing.

Is Medellín still cheap enough to attract foreign buyers?

Medellín still looks cheap beside many US cities, but the bargain has become much less obvious for dollar buyers.

The biggest change lately has come from the currency.

During an earlier part of Medellín’s foreign-buying boom, one US dollar could buy well above COP 4,000 and at times roughly COP 4,420. The Banco de la República’s latest published TRM is close to COP 3,200 per dollar.

Take a COP 500 million apartment. At COP 4,420 per dollar, the price works out to roughly US$113,000. At COP 3,200, that same COP 500 million costs around US$156,000.

The buyer suddenly needs about US$43,000 more even though the apartment’s peso price has not changed.

Local property prices have also risen during the same period, so foreign buyers are getting squeezed from both directions. Apartments cost more pesos, while each dollar buys fewer pesos.

Someone arriving today from Miami or New York can still find Medellín inexpensive compared with comparable central neighborhoods back home. But the old pitch that almost everything in El Poblado looks absurdly cheap in dollars is becoming harder to defend.

Is the stronger Colombian peso starting to push foreigners out of Medellín?

The stronger peso is probably slowing some foreign buyers down, but we still see plenty of evidence that foreigners are staying in the Medellín market.

The effect on purchasing power is large enough that we should not dismiss it. A US$150,000 budget converts into roughly COP 663 million at COP 4,420 per dollar. At COP 3,200, it buys only COP 480 million.

That is COP 183 million of lost purchasing power.

For an investor choosing between neighborhoods, COP 183 million can completely change the property search. A newer El Poblado apartment may become an older resale unit. El Poblado may become Laureles. Medellín may become Envigado, Sabaneta or another market entirely.

We also have some evidence of softer foreign participation. As seen above, Antioquia’s foreign share fell from around 3.8% in Camacol’s April 2025 measurement to 3.28% in November, while the national foreign share has also edged lower.

But Medellín’s overall housing market was strengthening during roughly the same period. La Lonja recorded 6,371 new-home sales in Medellín during 2025, 56% more than the previous year. Valle de Aburrá sales rose 44% to 17,350.

Foreigners therefore became a slightly smaller part of a market that was selling many more homes.

For now, the stronger peso looks more like a drag on foreign demand at the margin than something that is chasing foreigners away.

Are foreigners pushing Medellín property prices up?

Foreign buyers can have a noticeable effect on prices in El Poblado and other internationally popular areas, but they are far too small a group to explain Medellín’s entire housing-price increase.

The 3.28% Antioquia foreign-buyer share puts a useful ceiling on the argument. Even allowing for resale transactions that Camacol does not capture, actual foreigners remain a minority of buyers.

Their impact becomes much stronger once we zoom into a few neighborhoods and property types.

Foreigners disproportionately shop for non-VIS housing, and Camacol measured their share at 4% nationally in that segment versus only 1.2% in VIS housing. They also tend to favor relatively compact units in premium locations. That puts foreign money directly into markets where land is scarce and developers know buyers may be comparing prices with Miami, Toronto or Madrid rather than with Medellín salaries.

Broader external demand adds another layer. Colombians abroad accounted for 15.6% of non-VIS sales in Camacol’s latest national census. Combine them with foreigners and almost one in five new non-VIS purchases in the surveyed projects came from someone living outside Colombia.

That group has enough weight to influence pricing in certain projects.

Still, Medellín has plenty of homegrown reasons for expensive housing: scarce buildable land in desirable locations, construction costs, restricted new supply in some areas, a recovering domestic market and strong rental demand.

Foreigners are part of the price story, especially around El Poblado. Treating them as the main explanation for citywide prices goes much further than the data supports.

Is Medellín’s property market itself still strong?

Yes. Medellín’s housing market is selling considerably more new homes now than it was during the recent slowdown, which means foreign buyers are entering a market with strong domestic demand underneath them.

La Lonja counted 6,371 new homes sold inside Medellín during 2025, up 56% from the previous year. Across the Valle de Aburrá, sales reached 17,350, an increase of 44%.

Rental conditions were tight as well. La Lonja said placements of used rental homes in strata 4, 5 and 6 increased 33% during 2025, while the number of homes available to rent fell by around 6%.

Those two figures together are more informative than either one alone. More properties were finding tenants while available inventory was shrinking.

We should still avoid calling this another full property boom. BBVA Research’s latest Colombian real-estate outlook says the national recovery is real but remains partial, with new-home sales still below the strongest historical periods and affordability constrained by expensive credit.

For Medellín specifically, however, the recent numbers are strong enough to rule out the idea that foreigners are propping up an otherwise dead market.

Is Airbnb still giving foreigners a reason to buy in Medellín?

Yes, but buying a Medellín apartment for Airbnb currently requires much better property selection than it did when simply entering the market early was enough.

AirDNA’s latest completed month shows 14,021 active short-term-rental listings across Medellín. Average occupancy was 63%, the average daily rate was US$71 and trailing annual revenue per active listing was about US$15,500.

The year-over-year movements are unusually large. Active listings fell 41.6%, occupancy rose 25.9%, average daily rates dropped 16.9% and RevPAR rose 8.3%.

Those figures need careful reading because a changing AirDNA inventory can make year-over-year revenue comparisons look dramatic. Still, we can see a market where fewer listings are being tracked as active, the surviving inventory is filling more nights, and operators are accepting lower nightly prices.

That is a much more competitive market than the simplistic Medellín Airbnb story of a few years ago.

At the same time, tourism remains huge. Medellín reported around 1.3 million international tourists a year in its recent city data. During 2025, more than 2 million Colombian and foreign non-resident passengers entered through the José María Córdova migration point, and international arrivals remained strong into 2026.

Foreign investors therefore still have a real customer base. What they no longer have is a guarantee that an average apartment with average management will produce exceptional returns.

Has Colombia’s property investor visa become much harder for foreign buyers?

Yes. The current property threshold for Colombia’s Migrant Investor visa has become high enough that many normal Medellín apartment purchases no longer qualify.

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry requires a property used for the M Investor visa to be worth at least 350 statutory monthly minimum wages.

The current minimum wage is COP 1,750,905. Multiply that by 350 and the required property value comes to roughly COP 612.8 million.

At a recent exchange rate around COP 3,200 per dollar, that works out to approximately US$191,000.

The stronger peso makes the hurdle noticeably more painful for Americans. And unlike a few years ago, COP 613 million is no longer an unusually high budget in the most popular foreign-buyer neighborhoods.

This affects one specific type of buyer: someone who wants property ownership to qualify them for an investor visa. Foreigners are still allowed to own Colombian real estate without becoming residents, so someone buying purely for lifestyle or investment does not need to cross this threshold.

Even so, the visa is now a much weaker reason to stretch into Medellín property than it was when the same peso requirement translated into far fewer dollars.

Is Medellín still attracting enough foreigners to keep property demand alive?

Yes. Medellín’s international visitor base is still large enough to keep feeding new potential residents and property buyers into the city.

Medellín received around 954,600 tourists during the first half of 2025, according to the city government. About 546,000 were foreigners, up 11.8% from the comparable period.

The more recent airport numbers show that international traffic has stayed high. For the mid-year 2026 holiday period alone, Medellín expected between 128,000 and 136,000 international passengers to enter through José María Córdova.

Another useful long-term comparison comes from migration data. Foreigners and Colombians living abroad represented 36% of arrivals through José María Córdova in 2014. By the first half of 2025, the share had reached 61.5%.

That is a fundamental change in who passes through Medellín.

The US connection remains especially important. Americans accounted for 310,517 Medellín visitors in 2025 and, as pointed out above, 68.1% of Camacol’s measured foreign home buyers nationally.

So even after the currency advantage weakened, Medellín kept attracting enormous numbers of people from its most important foreign property-buying market. That gives foreign housing demand a much deeper base than a temporary social-media trend.

Are foreigners still going to buy Medellín property from here?

Yes, but the next wave of foreign buyers will probably be more selective than the buyers who arrived when Medellín was dramatically cheaper in dollars.

Several reasons to buy remain strong. Foreigners can own Colombian real estate without first becoming residents. Medellín keeps attracting large numbers of American and other international visitors. Rental demand remains deep. Antioquia ranks near the top of Colombia for foreign home purchases, and El Poblado continues to have a large, liquid property market.

The weaker parts of the story are mostly financial.

Dollar purchasing power has fallen sharply. Prime neighborhoods have become more expensive. The investor-visa threshold is now around COP 613 million. Short-term rentals still work, but AirDNA’s latest figures show a market where occupancy, pricing and supply are moving quickly enough that buying blindly is dangerous.

That changes who is likely to keep buying.

A foreigner who visits Medellín repeatedly, wants to live there part of the year, has family or business ties, or has found a property with unusually good rental economics still has plenty of reasons to purchase. Someone whose entire thesis was “Medellín is ridiculously cheap and every Airbnb makes money” has a much weaker case today.

Foreign demand should therefore continue, but buyers are likely to become more sensitive to the exact neighborhood, building rules, purchase price and rental strategy.

So, are foreigners still buying property in Medellín?

Yes. Foreigners are clearly still buying property in Medellín today, but the foreign-buying story is smaller and more mature than the most dramatic headlines suggest.

The strongest evidence is Camacol’s latest detailed census: foreign non-residents bought 3.28% of new homes in Antioquia, one of the highest shares in Colombia. That is enough to make foreigners important, especially once their purchases cluster in El Poblado, southern Medellín and other premium areas.

The bigger change is happening around them. Colombians living abroad now buy far more Colombian housing than foreigners do. The wider Medellín housing market has rebounded strongly. Tourism keeps bringing large numbers of Americans into the city. At the same time, a much stronger peso, higher local property prices and a roughly COP 613 million investor-visa threshold have made Medellín significantly more expensive in dollar terms.

So we would describe the current market as active rather than booming.

Foreigners have certainly not abandoned Medellín. They are still buying enough property to affect particular neighborhoods and projects. What has faded is the extraordinary financial advantage that helped create the first rush of international buyers.

Today’s foreign buyer generally needs a better reason to buy than “Medellín is cheap.” The fact that thousands are still choosing to do it anyway is probably the clearest evidence that foreign demand has become a lasting part of Medellín’s property market.

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