Is the property market in Tulum still growing?

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Are Tulum property sales still growing?

Tulum property sales are falling sharply today, which makes it very difficult to call the broader real estate market a growing one.

The clearest numbers come from the latest InfoHabitat analysis based on Softec market data. Annual residential sales in Tulum fell from 3,487 homes in 2023 to 1,711 in 2025. That is a 51% drop in only two years.

Projects are also selling more slowly. Average monthly absorption per development fell from 1.4 homes in 2022 to 0.9 in 2025.

That slowdown becomes much more important when we compare it with what developers built. Homes under construction jumped from 1,466 in 2017 to 13,266 in 2023, while available housing inventory increased from 3,243 units in 2019 to 6,340 in 2023.

At the 2025 sales pace, those 6,340 homes alone would equal roughly 3.7 years of annual transactions. The 13,266 homes that were under construction in 2023 represented almost eight years of sales at the latest pace, although developments obviously reach the market at different times.

This is the central problem in Tulum right now: supply grew dramatically faster than the number of buyers willing to absorb it.

Did Tulum simply build too many condos?

Yes. Tulum built far more investor-oriented housing than buyers and renters can comfortably absorb at current demand levels.

The scale of the construction boom is hard to explain away. Units under construction increased more than eightfold between 2017 and 2023, while annual sales eventually moved in the opposite direction.

A large share of that new stock was also very specific: furnished studios, one-bedroom apartments, lock-off units and amenity-heavy developments sold largely around vacation rentals, foreign investment and expected appreciation.

That model works well while new investors keep arriving and tourist demand grows fast enough to fill the additional units. Tulum reached the point where both assumptions became much harder to defend.

The latest InfoHabitat analysis puts occupied housing at only around 21% of Tulum's housing stock, compared with roughly 82% in Playa del Carmen and 89% in Cancún. Vacation homes and investment properties make that comparison imperfect, but they also explain the huge difference.

Tulum has effectively built two housing markets at once: one for people who actually live there and another much larger-than-normal segment designed around tourism and investment.

Local population growth can support the first one. It cannot automatically clear thousands of investor condos.

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Are Tulum property prices still going up?

Some Tulum property prices are still rising, but the apartment market as a whole is slightly down and the gap between neighborhoods has become unusually large.

Propiedades.com's latest market update shows average apartment values across Tulum about 2% below their February 2025 level.

Inside the city, the picture changes dramatically.

La Veleta is up roughly 9.1%, with a typical apartment around MXN 3.25 million. Region 15 Kukulcán has gained about 6%, while Villas Tulum is up 10.7%. Aldea Zama is almost unchanged at -0.4%.

Several other areas have gone the other way. Lúum Zama is down 11.4%, Ya Ax Tulum is down 12.4%, and some thinner submarkets have fallen even more.

These figures mix listing and transaction information and can move when the type of homes being advertised changes, so we would not treat every percentage point as a precise appreciation index. The broader pattern is much harder to dismiss: buyers are no longer bidding up Tulum as one single market.

During the boom, location exposure alone could carry a mediocre property higher. These days, the building, street, access, price and management quality have become much more important.

Why can Quintana Roo property prices rise while Tulum slows down?

Quintana Roo can have strong housing appreciation while Tulum struggles because Tulum is much more dependent on cash buyers, foreign investors and tourism-oriented condos than the state as a whole.

Mexico's Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal reported roughly 14% housing-price growth in Quintana Roo during 2025, putting the state among Mexico's strongest markets.

That figure can look completely incompatible with Tulum's falling sales and roughly 2% decline in apartment values. The two datasets are measuring very different things.

The SHF index follows homes bought using mortgage financing. Cancún, Playa del Carmen and other parts of Quintana Roo have much deeper owner-occupier markets where Mexican households routinely use mortgages.

Tulum's boom was much more heavily driven by presales, cash purchases, international buyers and apartments designed as investment properties. Those transactions are poorly represented by a mortgage-based statewide index.

The result is a useful warning for anyone researching Tulum today. A headline saying “Quintana Roo prices rose 14%” tells us very little about whether a one-bedroom condo in Aldea Zama or Region 15 actually gained 14%.

The direct Tulum data show a much weaker market.

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Is tourism still growing fast enough to support Tulum real estate?

Tulum tourism is currently weakening rather than growing fast enough to rescue the property market.

Official Quintana Roo tourism data show Tulum receiving about 1.68 million visitors in 2025, down 5.3% from roughly 1.77 million in 2024.

Hotel supply kept increasing at the same time. Tulum reached 239 hotels and 11,993 rooms by the end of 2025, around 5% more rooms than a year earlier.

More rooms competing for fewer visitors pushed hotel occupancy down. Tulum averaged 69.1% occupancy during 2025 after 73.8% in 2024.

The newest official SITUR figures are weaker again. During the first six months of 2026, Tulum hotel occupancy averaged 66.18%, compared with 74.32% over the same period in 2025. That is an 8.13-percentage-point decline.

For comparison, hotel occupancy across Quintana Roo fell by only 2.95 points during the same period. Playa del Carmen lost 4.47 points and Cancún 2.02.

Tulum therefore underperformed both the state and its closest large Riviera Maya competitor.

The city still receives a huge number of tourists, so there is plenty of accommodation demand. The problem is the direction: tourist arrivals have recently fallen while hotel and residential lodging capacity remain enormous.

Has Tulum Airport actually boosted the property market?

Tulum Airport has made the destination much easier to reach, but passenger traffic is currently falling too quickly to support the idea that the airport has already restarted the real estate boom.

Felipe Carrillo Puerto International Airport opened at the end of 2023 and quickly became one of the strongest arguments used to sell new property.

The airport handled around 1.23 million passengers in 2024 and approximately 1.24 million in 2025. That first full-year comparison was essentially flat.

Traffic then weakened considerably.

According to the latest operational statistics from Mexico's Federal Civil Aviation Agency, Tulum Airport handled 471,500 passengers during the first half of 2026, down 33.2% from 705,400 over the same period in 2025.

International traffic fell even faster, from 417,600 passengers to 247,100, a drop of 40.8%. Domestic traffic declined 22%.

June was particularly weak, with total passenger traffic down 44.8% year over year and international traffic down 63.2%.

Seasonality and airline schedule changes can produce big swings at a young airport, so six months do not tell us what traffic will look like five years from now. They do tell us something much simpler about the property market: the airport is currently failing to generate the sustained surge in visitors that many development pitches assumed.

As we saw above, residential sales also halved even after the airport opened.

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Is Tulum's Airbnb market finally getting healthier?

Tulum's Airbnb market is getting less crowded, but the latest numbers still show weak pricing power rather than a clean recovery in tourist demand.

AirDNA's latest Tulum dataset tracks about 4,130 active short-term rentals. That is 69.4% fewer than a year earlier under AirDNA's active-listing methodology.

At the same time, occupancy has climbed 17.4% to 46%, while average annual revenue per active property has jumped 62.2% to roughly $17,700.

Those two numbers look spectacular until we examine what guests are paying.

Average daily rates have dropped 23% to about $125, while RevPAR — the revenue generated per available night — remains 9.7% lower than a year ago at $57.

The read is fairly clear. A much smaller pool of active properties is sharing the available bookings, so the surviving listings are filling more nights and generating more annual revenue per property. Operators are also accepting much lower nightly rates to do it.

That is useful progress for owners who remain active. It gives us much less evidence of booming underlying demand.

The huge fall in tracked active listings also deserves caution because short-term-rental datasets can change as listings go inactive, switch platforms, alter availability or fall outside a provider's methodology. Still, the direction matches what we would expect in an oversupplied market: weaker properties leave, stronger operators capture more bookings, and pricing remains under pressure.

Can Tulum rental yields still justify today's property prices?

Tulum rentals can still produce attractive yields on the right purchase, but current rents make many investor condos look expensive unless the buyer gets a very good entry price.

The short-term-rental numbers already show why. AirDNA's average active Tulum listing now generates around $17,700 in gross annual revenue.

A property bought for $150,000 and earning $17,700 would generate 11.8% gross revenue before expenses. At $200,000, that drops to 8.9%. At $300,000, the same revenue produces only 5.9%.

Those figures come before property management, cleaning, condominium fees, electricity, internet, maintenance, furniture replacement, insurance, taxes and periods when the owner blocks the property.

Long-term rents are also soft in several popular neighborhoods. Propiedades.com's latest data show average apartment rents across Tulum down about 5.6% from February 2025.

La Veleta is down 8.6% to roughly MXN 16,700 per month. Aldea Zama is down 7.4% to around MXN 24,600. Region 15 is one of the stronger exceptions, with rents up about 6% to MXN 18,700.

That creates an interesting split. La Veleta apartment sale prices rose around 9% while asking rents fell nearly 9%. When prices move up and rents move down, rental yield compresses unless the property produces unusually strong vacation-rental income.

Buying cheaply has therefore become much more important than simply choosing Tulum.

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Doesn't Tulum's fast population growth keep the property market growing?

Tulum's population is growing fast, but local population growth cannot absorb the type or price of housing created during the investment boom.

INEGI counted 46,721 residents in Tulum municipality in the 2020 census, 65.3% more than in 2010. Few Mexican destinations grew that quickly.

That creates real demand for homes, schools, supermarkets, services and infrastructure. Tulum is clearly becoming a larger permanent city.

The mismatch comes from what developers built.

A local household looking for a primary residence and an overseas investor buying a furnished one-bedroom condo with a rooftop pool are participating in very different markets. Their budgets, financing options and reasons for buying barely overlap.

This helps explain why Tulum can have strong demographic growth and still struggle with housing oversupply. The city needs homes, but a large share of the existing inventory was priced and designed for visitors and investors rather than local households.

The unusually low share of occupied housing reinforces that point. InfoHabitat's latest analysis puts Tulum at around 21%, compared with 82% in Playa del Carmen and 89% in Cancún.

Population growth remains one of Tulum's strongest long-term fundamentals. It gives us far less reassurance about whether today's thousands of investor condos are correctly priced.

Are some parts of Tulum still growing despite the slowdown?

Yes. Some Tulum neighborhoods are still appreciating, and the current market is rewarding good locations much more selectively than it did during the boom.

La Veleta is the clearest large-market example. Its apartment values are roughly 9.1% above February 2025 levels even though Tulum overall is down around 2%.

Region 15 Kukulcán has gained about 6%, while Villas Tulum is up 10.7%.

The interesting part is what happens nearby. Aldea Zama is almost flat, Lúum Zama is down 11.4%, and Ya Ax Tulum is down 12.4%.

Even property type can reverse the conclusion. Apartments in Region 15 are up around 6%, while house values in the same area are down approximately 18.6% according to the latest Propiedades.com data.

So a question such as “Are Tulum prices rising?” has become almost too broad to be useful.

Today we need to know whether we are talking about an apartment or a house, a completed resale or presale, the exact neighborhood, access to paved roads, utility reliability, building quality and how many nearly identical units compete in the same development.

Tulum still has properties that can appreciate. The easy citywide trade has disappeared.

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Could Tulum be close to the bottom of its property slowdown?

Tulum could be getting closer to the bottom of its property cycle, but the latest demand data still fall short of proving that a broad recovery has begun.

There are some genuinely better signs.

Short-term-rental supply has contracted sharply in AirDNA's latest dataset, so the enormous pool of vacation rentals is starting to thin. Remaining Airbnb properties are achieving higher occupancy and much stronger average annual revenue. La Veleta, Region 15 and Villas Tulum have all recorded rising apartment values despite the wider slowdown.

Development conditions have also changed. Buyers now have enough inventory to compare projects aggressively, while weaker developers and poorly differentiated units face far more pressure than they did a few years ago.

That sort of shakeout can eventually create a healthier market.

The demand side still looks too weak for us to call the turn. Residential sales fell to 1,711 in 2025. Project absorption was only 0.9 units per month. Tulum's first-half hotel occupancy dropped more than eight percentage points year over year. Airport passenger traffic fell by one-third, and short-term-rental RevPAR remains below last year's level.

Those indicators do not all need to turn positive simultaneously. We would, however, want to see residential sales and absorption clearly improve before saying the broader Tulum property market has started another growth cycle.

For now, the evidence looks more like late-stage correction than renewed boom.

What would prove that Tulum's property market is growing again?

Tulum's property market will look genuinely healthy again when buyers start absorbing existing supply faster and tourism revenue improves without relying mainly on lower prices or disappearing competitors.

Residential transactions are the first thing we would watch. Annual sales do not have to return immediately to the 3,487 units recorded in 2023, but the fall to 1,711 needs to reverse decisively.

Project absorption is equally useful because it cuts through headline asking prices. Moving sustainably above one sale per project per month would show developers clearing stock faster.

Tourism also needs to stop weakening. The latest 66.18% first-half hotel occupancy is far below the 74.32% recorded a year earlier. A meaningful rebound there would support both hotels and privately owned vacation rentals.

For Airbnb, rising occupancy becomes much more convincing if ADR and RevPAR stabilize at the same time. Higher occupancy achieved alongside a 23% drop in nightly rates gives us a much weaker recovery story.

Airport traffic would add another confirmation if passenger numbers return to sustained year-over-year growth.

Finally, price appreciation needs to become broader. La Veleta or Villas Tulum can rise while the wider market remains soft. A genuine new cycle should eventually lift transaction volume and prices across a larger group of established neighborhoods.

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Is the property market in Tulum still growing?

No. As of now, Tulum's broader property market is shrinking in transaction activity and working through the excess supply created during its boom, even though some neighborhoods are still appreciating and the city itself continues to develop.

The strongest evidence comes from actual buying activity. Annual residential sales dropped from 3,487 units in 2023 to 1,711 in 2025, while sales per development fell to 0.9 homes a month. Meanwhile, the earlier construction wave had pushed units under construction above 13,000.

Prices add nuance rather than overturning that conclusion. Tulum apartment values are roughly 2% lower overall since February 2025, yet La Veleta is up 9.1%, Region 15 is up 6% and Villas Tulum is up 10.7%. Aldea Zama is almost flat, while Lúum Zama and several smaller areas are down by double digits.

Tourism currently makes the growth argument even harder. Tulum received fewer visitors in 2025, first-half hotel occupancy has since fallen from 74.32% to 66.18%, and the airport handled 33.2% fewer passengers during the latest first-half comparison.

Short-term rentals offer the first meaningful sign of rebalancing. AirDNA now tracks far fewer active properties, while occupancy and average annual revenue per surviving listing have improved. Yet average nightly rates are down 23% and RevPAR remains lower, so owners are still competing heavily on price.

We would describe Tulum today as a property market working through the aftermath of an enormous development cycle. Buyers have more leverage, mediocre inventory is being exposed, and strong properties are starting to separate from everything around them.

That actually creates opportunities. A completed property in a proven area, bought below an unrealistic seller's asking price, can look much better today than the same property did during the frenzy. The mistake would be assuming that every condo will rise simply because it is in Tulum.

Tulum can eventually grow strongly again. Its population is expanding, infrastructure is improving, international recognition remains exceptional and the destination now has transport links that barely existed a few years ago.

The current numbers have not reached that stage yet.

The Tulum boom is over for now. The next growth cycle, if it comes, will have to be earned by real demand rather than by another wave of construction.

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THE LATINVESTOR

A team specialized in real estate investing in LATAM countries

We are a team of financial experts, legal professionals, developers, and local real estate specialists dedicated to helping people like you avoid mistakes when investing in real estate in a foreign place, particularly in Tulum. If you’d like to learn more about us, you can check our presentation page.