Is the property market in Santa Marta still growing?

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Are Santa Marta property sales still going up?

Santa Marta property sales are still growing now, but the latest increase is only 3%, so the market has clearly slowed from the stronger rebound seen earlier.

According to Camacol Magdalena’s latest figures from Coordenada Urbana, Santa Marta recorded 5,624 new-home sales over the twelve months through June 2026, compared with 5,475 over the previous comparable period. That works out to roughly 3% growth.

The direction is still positive after several difficult years for Colombian housing. But 3% tells us much more than simply saying that Santa Marta is “growing.” Buyers are still absorbing slightly more homes than a year earlier, while the pace has moved into low single digits.

The earlier recovery was stronger. Santa Marta sold 2,619 homes in the first half of 2025, and investment in new housing reached more than COP 1.5 trillion, according to Camacol Magdalena. By the latest twelve-month period, sales were still climbing, but the acceleration had clearly cooled.

So yes, transactions are rising today. We just would not describe this as runaway growth.

Is Santa Marta still booming, or is this mostly a recovery?

Santa Marta looks more like a market that recovered successfully and kept growing than a city entering a fresh property boom.

The longer sales history makes the distinction fairly clear. Magdalena recorded around 6,550 new-home sales over the twelve months through October 2022. By the same point in 2023, that had fallen to 5,461, a drop of about 17%. Sales weakened again during 2024 before recovering through 2025.

That changes how we should read the current market. A 3% increase after a deep downturn is good evidence that demand has stabilized. It does not mean Santa Marta has suddenly entered an extraordinary new cycle.

There is another clue in the supply data. Camacol Magdalena’s figures for early 2025 showed launches falling sharply while construction already underway kept rising. By March, housing starts were up 37% year over year and units under construction were up 29%, while new launches had fallen 75%.

That combination fits a market where developers were working through projects already sold or launched rather than flooding Santa Marta with another wave of new inventory.

Santa Marta has recovered from its downturn and remains in expansion, but the current phase is much less aggressive than the word “boom” suggests.

Are Santa Marta property prices still rising?

Santa Marta property prices are still very high today, especially for apartments, although the evidence is much stronger on current price levels than on the exact citywide appreciation rate.

Metrocuadrado data published during the first part of 2026 put the average asking price for 50–100 m² apartments in Santa Marta at as much as COP 7.76 million per m². In the same comparison, Bogotá was around COP 6.11 million, Medellín COP 5.08 million and Barranquilla COP 4.06 million.

That is a striking result. Santa Marta came out roughly 50% above the average of COP 5.19 million per m² across the cities included in the comparison.

We should still be careful about what that number means. Metrocuadrado tracks advertised properties, so this is not an official repeat-sales index showing that the same apartment appreciated by a specific percentage. Santa Marta also has an unusually large share of relatively small, modern tourist apartments, which can push the average price per square metre higher.

Even with that caveat, buyers looking at modern Santa Marta apartments today are no longer entering a cheap Colombian property market. In some segments they are paying more per square metre than buyers in Bogotá or Medellín.

That makes the next stage of growth harder. Prices can keep rising, but they now need stronger rents, better locations or more scarcity to justify doing so.

Where is Santa Marta property growth strongest right now?

Santa Marta’s strongest property growth is still concentrated around Playa Salguero, Pozos Colorados and Bello Horizonte, where developers are selling a tourism product as much as a conventional home.

Camacol Magdalena reported 4,883 homes on offer in Santa Marta in April 2025, with much of that activity concentrated in the southern tourist corridor. A few months later, the association reported 4,752 active units across the city and said 91% of the available stock was aimed at the tourist-housing segment.

The difference in product is easy to see. Projects in this corridor frequently combine relatively compact apartments with pools, rooftop areas, coworking spaces, resort-style common areas and rules designed to accommodate vacation rentals.

That helps explain why Santa Marta can simultaneously have expensive apartment prices and much cheaper housing elsewhere in the city. The property market has become increasingly split between coastal investment stock and homes bought primarily for local residential use.

We would be cautious with any statement about “the Santa Marta market” as though every neighborhood were following one price cycle. Beach access, views, building quality, rental rules and proximity to the airport can now matter more than the citywide average.

For future growth, scarcity should increasingly matter. An apartment with an unobstructed sea view or genuine beachfront location has something a developer cannot reproduce easily. Another small one-bedroom apartment several streets inland has much more competition.

Who is buying all these Santa Marta apartments?

People who live outside Santa Marta are driving most of the new-home market, which is probably the clearest explanation for how the city supports so much tourist-oriented construction.

Camacol Magdalena found that roughly 74% of buyers of new homes did not permanently live in Santa Marta. Around 55% came from other parts of Colombia, while roughly 19% were Colombians living overseas or foreign buyers, particularly from countries such as the United States and Canada.

That is an unusually important figure because local salaries alone would struggle to support the prices now seen in parts of Bello Horizonte, Pozos Colorados or Playa Salguero.

A Bogotá household buying a second home, an Antioquia investor buying a rental apartment and a Colombian living abroad earning dollars all face a very different affordability equation from a salaried household living in Santa Marta.

The dependence on outside money also makes the market more mobile. These buyers can choose Cartagena, Medellín, the Caribbean coast abroad or simply financial assets instead. Santa Marta benefits enormously when its tourism story looks attractive, but it also has to keep earning that capital.

Camacol’s regional data make the attraction particularly visible. Santa Marta has captured a large share of purchases made outside their home markets by buyers from Bogotá and Antioquia.

Is tourism still strong enough to keep Santa Marta real estate growing?

Santa Marta tourism is still growing strongly enough to support property demand, and the latest airport data make that argument stronger rather than weaker.

The Simón Bolívar airport handled 3.79 million passengers in 2025, according to Aeronáutica Civil data compiled by Pro Santa Marta Vital. Traffic grew 4.7% from 3.62 million a year earlier, making Santa Marta the fifth-busiest airport in Colombia by passenger movement.

The newer numbers show that demand remained intense into 2026. Pro Santa Marta Vital’s analysis of Aerocivil data found that Simón Bolívar airport ran at 85.2% occupancy during the first half of the year, the highest rate among Colombia’s main airports.

International tourism is moving even faster. Migración Colombia recorded 72,276 foreign visitors to Santa Marta in 2025, coming from 134 countries. About 58,648 travelled for tourism, up 19% from the previous year.

That matters more for property than a single packed holiday weekend. We are looking at several million annual airport passengers, rising international arrivals and a buyer market heavily exposed to people from outside the city. Those trends reinforce each other.

There is still a ceiling. Santa Marta has far fewer direct international connections than Cartagena, so most foreign visitors reach the city through domestic connections or overland travel. Better international access would probably make the investment market easier to grow.

For now, tourism remains one of Santa Marta property’s strongest supports.

Is Santa Marta’s Airbnb market still growing?

Santa Marta’s short-term-rental market is currently producing better occupancy with far fewer active listings, which looks much more like consolidation than another wave of Airbnb expansion.

AirDNA’s freshest full-month data, covering July 2026 and updated in late August, show 6,999 active short-term rentals across Santa Marta. Active supply fell 34.5% over twelve months.

At the same time, average occupancy rose 21.1% to 46%, RevPAR increased 13.3% to US$33 and average annual revenue per active listing reached roughly US$10,900. The average nightly rate moved the other way, falling 16.8% to US$71.

Those numbers tell a more interesting story than “Airbnb is booming.” Roughly one-third of the active supply disappeared, while the properties that remained were booked much more frequently.

The mix of listings is also revealing. AirDNA says nearly half of active rentals are one-bedroom properties, 88.4% are entire homes and 66% are available for most or all of the year. This is a large professional or investment-oriented rental market rather than a small collection of homeowners occasionally renting spare properties.

One detail deserves extra caution: more than half of active listings currently require stays of 30 nights or longer. So the 6,999 total should not be interpreted as 6,999 conventional nightly Airbnbs competing for weekend tourists.

The healthier occupancy is encouraging for owners. Still, 46% annual occupancy leaves a property empty for more than half of its available nights. A mediocre unit bought at a high price can easily produce disappointing net returns after management, administration, utilities, furnishing, maintenance and platform costs.

Is Santa Marta building too many tourist apartments?

Santa Marta has enough tourist apartments under construction to make oversupply a real risk in some buildings, even though the wider housing market is still absorbing new homes.

Camacol Magdalena reported 9,805 housing units under construction by June 2025. At the same time, active sales inventory stood at 4,752 units, with 91% classified in the tourist-housing segment.

Those are big numbers for a city of Santa Marta’s size, especially when many projects are chasing similar buyers with similar products.

The pressure is clearest in one-bedroom investment apartments. As seen above, nearly half of Santa Marta’s active short-term-rental stock now falls into the one-bedroom category. Developers are also heavily concentrated around the same southern coastal corridor.

This creates competition inside the growth story. A project can sell well while owners later discover that dozens of nearby buildings are offering similar apartments, similar pools and similar rental promises.

The latest Airbnb contraction is useful here. Active supply falling by more than one-third suggests that the rental market has already been forcing weaker or less suitable listings out.

We would separate construction growth from investment quality. Santa Marta can keep building and selling apartments while some individual investors still earn poor returns.

The safest part of the market is increasingly likely to be property that stands out for a concrete reason: exceptional location, genuinely scarce view, strong operator, unusually good building management or appeal to both tourists and permanent residents.

Are high mortgage rates holding Santa Marta property back?

High Colombian mortgage rates are still holding Santa Marta property growth back, especially among buyers who depend on local salaries and bank financing.

Banco de la República’s policy rate currently sits at 12%, while housing loans remain expensive by the standards buyers enjoyed before Colombia’s inflation shock.

The impact is simple when we translate it into a purchase. A COP 550 million apartment with a 70% mortgage requires financing roughly COP 385 million. At double-digit borrowing rates, monthly debt service becomes difficult for many Colombian households even before building fees, insurance and property expenses are included.

Santa Marta gets more protection from this problem than a normal residential city because so many buyers come from outside Magdalena. Cash buyers, Colombians living overseas and wealthier second-home purchasers are less sensitive to Colombian mortgage rates.

But financing still matters. It narrows the local buyer pool and makes already expensive coastal apartments harder to resell to ordinary households.

That helps explain why Santa Marta can have strong tourism, thousands of units under construction and positive sales growth while still advancing at only a modest pace today.

Has the stronger Colombian peso made Santa Marta less attractive to foreigners?

The stronger Colombian peso has made Santa Marta substantially more expensive for dollar buyers, removing one of the easiest arguments foreigners had for buying Colombian property.

Take a COP 700 million apartment. At COP 4,050 per US dollar, the purchase costs around US$173,000. At COP 3,200, that same apartment costs almost US$219,000.

Nothing about the property changed, yet the foreign buyer has to find another US$46,000.

The effect becomes larger at the premium end. A COP 1 billion property moves from roughly US$247,000 to US$313,000 across those same exchange rates, an increase of around US$66,000.

That is a real drag in Santa Marta because foreign buyers and Colombians earning overseas income form a meaningful part of demand. A few years ago, the weak peso made Colombian Caribbean property look exceptionally inexpensive in dollars. That discount is much smaller these days.

Foreign demand has clearly survived so far, but future appreciation becomes harder when the same apartment is rising in pesos and simultaneously becoming more expensive through the exchange rate.

Could Santa Marta’s water problems limit the property market?

Santa Marta’s water problems can absolutely limit future property growth, and the latest desalination update makes it too early to assume that this constraint will disappear soon.

Santa Marta has lived with chronic water shortages, high network losses, weak dry-season river flows and recurring disruptions for years. ESSMAR has reported water losses around 58%, while service continuity has remained below a universal 24-hour standard.

The problem gets harder as the city adds apartments, hotels and tourists. Large residential developments bring pools, gardens, laundry, restaurants and thousands of additional daily users into a system that already struggles during dry periods.

Plans for desalination could eventually change the equation, but there is an important recent update. ESSMAR clarified in August 2026 that it was not currently running a tender, awarding a contract or contracting construction of the desalination plants linked to the national proposal. The activity discussed publicly involved a request for non-binding offers.

That is much earlier in the process than an investor might assume after reading that a desalination project had been “advanced.”

ESSMAR had previously opened information and consultation around an integrated desalination, storage and distribution solution. The long-term objective remains important because desalination could reduce Santa Marta’s dependence on vulnerable surface-water sources.

For property investors today, though, the water problem remains operational rather than theoretical. Buyers should look at building storage capacity, tanker dependence, past interruptions and how management handles shortages instead of assuming citywide infrastructure will solve everything shortly.

This is probably the biggest physical constraint on how aggressively Santa Marta can keep adding high-density coastal housing.

Has Santa Marta property become too expensive to keep growing fast?

Parts of Santa Marta have already become expensive enough to slow future growth, particularly modern coastal apartments marketed to investors.

The Metrocuadrado figure of up to COP 7.76 million per m² for 50–100 m² apartments puts the problem into perspective. At that average, a 70 m² apartment comes to roughly COP 543 million before premiums for a better floor, sea view, parking, furniture or a high-end building.

Smaller new tourist units can carry an even higher price per square metre because buyers are purchasing amenities, location and rental permission as much as interior space.

That was easier to justify when Santa Marta was obviously cheaper than Colombia’s major cities and foreign buyers benefited from a weak peso. Neither advantage is as strong now.

Prices can still go higher. The buyer just needs more from the property in return.

A genuinely scarce beachfront apartment with strong rental demand can support a premium. A generic one-bedroom investment unit surrounded by hundreds of comparable apartments faces a harder equation.

Price growth should become more uneven from here. Santa Marta’s best assets can continue appreciating while weaker buildings spend much longer on the market or need discounts.

What would prove that Santa Marta’s property market has stopped growing?

We would call Santa Marta’s property growth over if home sales turned negative while tourism weakened, unsold stock climbed and rental performance deteriorated at the same time.

One bad indicator would not be enough. Housing sales can fall for a few months because mortgage rates change. Airbnb revenue can weaken after a particularly strong holiday period. Developers can temporarily add more inventory than buyers absorb.

The worrying scenario would involve several parts of the market breaking together.

So far, we are seeing the opposite mix. Sales remain slightly above the previous twelve-month period. Tourism continues to bring millions of passengers through Simón Bolívar airport. Foreign tourist arrivals have grown strongly. Short-term-rental occupancy has improved despite a sharp reduction in active supply.

There are plenty of reasons for growth to slow further: expensive credit, high coastal prices, a stronger peso, concentrated apartment supply and serious water constraints. None of those has yet pushed the overall market into contraction.

If sales eventually fall below the previous year while tourist demand softens and completed inventory starts accumulating, our conclusion would change quickly.

Is the property market in Santa Marta still growing?

Yes, Santa Marta’s property market is still growing today, although the current evidence points to a slower and much more selective expansion than the boom language around the city sometimes suggests.

The freshest housing number is the clearest starting point. As seen above, Camacol Magdalena recorded 3% growth in new-home sales over its latest twelve-month comparison. That is enough to say the market is still expanding, but nowhere near enough to claim Santa Marta is surging across every segment.

What keeps the growth story credible is what sits underneath it. Outside buyers dominate new-home purchases, tourism remains strong, the airport is operating at very high occupancy and developers have built a large coastal investment market around Playa Salguero, Pozos Colorados and Bello Horizonte.

The weaknesses are becoming harder to ignore, though. Santa Marta apartments are already expensive relative to other Colombian cities. Colombian financing remains costly. The stronger peso has raised the dollar price for overseas buyers. Tourist-apartment supply is concentrated in very similar products, while chronic water problems still constrain how easily the city can support more construction.

The short-term-rental numbers add another warning. Santa Marta currently has much better occupancy than a year earlier, but active listings have fallen dramatically. The market appears to be rewarding stronger properties while pushing weaker supply out.

Our conclusion is fairly sharp: Santa Marta is still a growing property market, but simply owning an apartment in Santa Marta is no longer enough to ride that growth.

The easier phase, when rising tourism and relatively cheap Colombian property could lift almost everything, is fading. From here, location, scarcity, building quality, rental rules, management and the purchase price will matter much more.

Santa Marta still has room to grow. The best coastal properties probably do too. But the city has already reached the stage where investors can be right about Santa Marta and still buy the wrong apartment.

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THE LATINVESTOR

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