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SUMMARY
No. Tulum rents are no longer rising broadly, and the clearest current evidence points to a real correction in the apartment market rather than another phase of rent inflation.
The decline is not being driven by one fringe neighborhood. La Veleta, Tulum Centro, Aldea Zama and Tumben Kaa are all cheaper than they were around a year and a half ago, and together they represent a large share of the apartments renters actually see.
Tulum can still feel expensive while rents fall. Aldea Zama apartments average roughly MXN 24,600 a month even after a 7.4% decline, so the market is correcting from a high starting point rather than suddenly becoming cheap.
The split between apartments and houses is increasingly important. Apartments are down more broadly, while scarce houses can still command much stronger pricing; Aldea Zama house rents, for example, have risen sharply even as its apartment rents have fallen.
The underlying problem for landlords is supply. Tulum's construction boom created a huge stock of investor-owned condos, while annual housing sales and project absorption later weakened. Renters are now choosing among large numbers of broadly interchangeable units.
That competition is visible at neighborhood level. La Veleta and Aldea Zama alone currently have almost 600 apartments advertised, which gives tenants far more leverage than a citywide average rent suggests.
Tourism is no longer absorbing that housing as easily as it once did. Tulum hotel occupancy has weakened substantially, and softer airport traffic adds to the evidence that visitor demand is currently running below the pace assumed during the property boom.
Airbnb is adding another layer of pressure. Short-term occupancy has improved, but hosts are achieving it with average daily rates down sharply and RevPAR still lower, making stable monthly tenants more attractive to some owners.
There are still pockets of strength. Region 15 apartment rents are up, some tiny luxury submarkets show large increases, and winter furnished leases can jump dramatically. Those examples are real, but they do not describe the typical Tulum apartment market.
The practical consequence is greater negotiating power for renters. Asking prices increasingly compete against dozens of substitutes, and landlords offering generic furnished condos have less ability to insist on boom-era rents simply because that is what their investment originally required.
A broad rental rebound probably needs either a major recovery in tourism and permanent resident demand or a meaningful reduction in excess housing supply. For now, neither force looks strong enough to overturn the wider downward trend.
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Are rents still rising in Tulum?
Are Tulum rents actually still rising today?
No. Tulum apartment rents are currently moving down overall, with the latest Propiedades.com data showing average asking rents 5.6% below their February 2025 level.
The decline is broad enough to take seriously. La Veleta is down 8.6%, Tulum Centro 8.2%, Aldea Zama 7.4%, Tumben Kaa 4% and Villas Tulum 14%. Aldea Tulum is basically flat. Region 15 Kukulcan, up 6%, is one of the few large apartment markets still moving the other way.
That gives us a much clearer answer than anecdotes about what one landlord charged last winter. Several of the neighborhoods with the deepest rental inventory are cheaper than they were roughly a year and a half ago.
There is one important complication. Tulum contains several rental markets at once. Apartment rents, house rents, four-month furnished leases and Airbnb nightly rates can move differently. Houses across Tulum, for example, are down only 2.8% in the same Propiedades.com series, and houses in Aldea Zama are up sharply.
So some owners really are getting higher rents. That just does not describe the typical Tulum apartment anymore.
| Tulum apartment market | Current average asking rent | Change since Feb. 2025 | Active listings |
|---|---|---|---|
| La Veleta | MXN 16,724 | -8.6% | 300 |
| Aldea Zama | MXN 24,593 | -7.4% | 288 |
| Tulum Centro | MXN 17,707 | -8.2% | 208 |
| Tumben Kaa | MXN 17,707 | -4.0% | 132 |
| Aldea Tulum | MXN 11,805 | 0.0% | 94 |
| Region 15 Kukulcan | MXN 18,691 | +6.0% | 91 |
| Villas Tulum | MXN 13,772 | -14.0% | 25 |
Why does Tulum still feel expensive if rents are falling?
Tulum still feels expensive because rents started from a high level, so a 5% or 10% correction does not suddenly turn the city into a cheap place to live.
Aldea Zama makes the point well. The latest average apartment asking rent there is about MXN 24,600 a month even after falling 7.4%. La Veleta sits closer to MXN 16,700, while Centro is around MXN 17,700.
Someone moving from a cheaper Mexican city can therefore arrive in Tulum, see MXN 20,000–25,000 furnished apartments and reasonably conclude that rents are high. They are. The direction of travel is simply different from the absolute price level.
Running costs add to that impression. Many furnished rentals exclude electricity, and heavy air-conditioning can make electricity unusually important in Tulum. Internet, cleaning or other services can also sit outside the advertised price.
This is why “Tulum is expensive” and “Tulum rents are rising” should not be treated as the same claim. The first can still be true while the second has clearly weakened.
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Where are Tulum apartment rents falling the most?
Tulum apartment rents are falling most clearly in Villas Tulum, La Veleta, Centro and Aldea Zama, while Region 15 is currently the main large-market exception.
Villas Tulum has the biggest percentage decline among those areas, at 14%, although its 25 active apartments make it a smaller market. La Veleta is more revealing because 300 apartments are currently listed there and rents are down 8.6%.
Centro shows a similar adjustment. Its average has moved down 8.2% to roughly MXN 17,700 across 208 active apartments. Aldea Zama has fallen 7.4% with 288 listings.
We can reverse those percentage changes to get a better sense of what tenants have actually gained. La Veleta's current MXN 16,724 average implies an earlier level of roughly MXN 18,300. Centro has moved from around MXN 19,300 to MXN 17,700. Aldea Zama has gone from roughly MXN 26,600 to MXN 24,600.
Those are roughly MXN 1,500–2,000 monthly reductions before any negotiation.
Region 15 looks different. Its average asking rent has risen 6% to about MXN 18,700, with 91 active apartments. That is large enough to consider a genuine local trend rather than statistical noise.
| Area | Approx. earlier rent | Current rent | Approx. monthly change | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aldea Zama | MXN 26,600 | MXN 24,593 | -MXN 2,000 | Down |
| La Veleta | MXN 18,300 | MXN 16,724 | -MXN 1,600 | Down |
| Tulum Centro | MXN 19,300 | MXN 17,707 | -MXN 1,600 | Down |
| Tumben Kaa | MXN 18,400 | MXN 17,707 | -MXN 700 | Down |
| Villas Tulum | MXN 16,000 | MXN 13,772 | -MXN 2,200 | Down |
| Region 15 Kukulcan | MXN 17,600 | MXN 18,691 | +MXN 1,100 | Up |
Are houses in Tulum falling too?
Tulum house rents are softer overall, but houses are holding up much better than apartments and some premium house markets are still rising strongly.
Propiedades.com's latest series puts average house rents across Tulum down 2.8% since February 2025. Apartments are down twice as much, at 5.6%.
The neighborhood differences are even wider. La Veleta houses are down 15.8%, while houses in Tulum Centro are down 20.1%. Aldea Zama goes firmly the other way: average house rents there have risen 23.8% to roughly MXN 59,700 a month.
There are only 27 active Aldea Zama houses in the dataset, compared with 288 apartments, so we should not give both numbers equal weight when answering what is happening to Tulum rents overall. Still, the house increase is real enough to explain why the market can look strong from the perspective of someone renting a villa or larger family property.
Supply helps explain the difference. Tulum has an enormous pool of investor-owned apartments competing with one another. Larger standalone homes are much less interchangeable.
The current market therefore rewards scarcity. A generic furnished condo has dozens of direct substitutes. A well-located three-bedroom house with outdoor space may have very few.
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Does Tulum have too many apartments for rents to keep rising?
Yes. Tulum currently has enough housing oversupply to make broad rent increases difficult, especially in the investor-heavy condo neighborhoods.
The scale of the construction boom is hard to overstate. A recent InfoHabitat analysis using Softec and tourism data found that homes under construction rose from 1,466 in 2017 to 13,266 in 2023.
That is a 1,028% increase in six years.
Sales eventually moved the other way. Annual housing sales fell from 3,487 units in 2023 to 1,711 in 2025, a drop of roughly 51%. Monthly absorption per development declined from 1.4 homes in 2022 to 0.9 in 2025.
Developers produced far more housing while buyers became slower to absorb it. Pretty simple.
The occupancy comparison is even more striking. The InfoHabitat analysis puts occupied housing at about 21% of stock in Tulum, versus 82% in Playa del Carmen and 89% in Cancún. Tulum naturally has more second homes and vacation properties than a conventional residential market, so that 21% cannot be read like a normal vacancy rate. Even with that caveat, it shows how unusually dependent Tulum has become on temporary visitors and investors.
All those condos eventually compete somewhere. Owners can try Airbnb, rent for several months, sign a long-term tenant, sell the property or leave it empty. When thousands of investors face the same choices, tenants gain leverage.
| Housing indicator | Earlier level | Later level | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Units under construction | 1,466 in 2017 | 13,266 in 2023 | +1,028% |
| Annual housing sales | 3,487 in 2023 | 1,711 in 2025 | -51% |
| Monthly absorption per development | 1.4 in 2022 | 0.9 in 2025 | -36% |
| Occupied housing in Tulum | — | ~21% | Very low versus nearby markets |
| Occupied housing in Playa del Carmen | — | ~82% | Much higher |
| Occupied housing in Cancún | — | ~89% | Much higher |
How much choice do Tulum renters have now?
Tulum renters currently have hundreds of comparable apartments to choose from, particularly in La Veleta, Aldea Zama, Centro and Tumben Kaa.
Propiedades.com's current inventory shows 300 apartments in La Veleta, 288 in Aldea Zama, 208 in Centro, 132 in Tumben Kaa, 94 in Aldea Tulum and 91 in Region 15.
Those six areas alone contain more than 1,100 active apartment listings.
The concentration is more important than the raw number. La Veleta and Aldea Zama alone account for almost 600. Both are packed with relatively modern furnished condos offering familiar combinations of swimming pools, gyms, rooftop areas, air conditioning and security.
That makes comparison easy for renters. Someone looking at a MXN 22,000 one-bedroom can open another listing and find a broadly similar apartment a few streets away.
Landlords lose pricing power quickly in that environment. They can still ask ambitious rents, but an asking price only becomes meaningful when a tenant accepts it.
The current listing depth is one of the clearest explanations for why advertised Tulum apartment rents have been coming down lately.
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Is weaker tourism pushing Tulum rents down?
Yes, weaker tourism is adding pressure to Tulum's rental market because the city built a large share of its housing around visitor demand.
Quintana Roo's official tourism observatory reports average Tulum hotel occupancy of 66.18% during the first half of 2026, down from 74.32% in the same period a year earlier.
An 8.13-percentage-point decline is large. It was also the worst drop among the major destinations in the state's comparison table. Across Quintana Roo as a whole, occupancy fell by 2.95 points.
The weakness started before this year. Full-year Tulum hotel occupancy had already slipped from 73.8% in 2024 to 69.1% in 2025.
Tulum Airport adds another piece. Passenger traffic began losing momentum after its rapid launch. AFAC-linked figures showed roughly 366,000 passengers in the first four months of 2026, while international traffic in the first quarter was around 34% below the same period of 2025.
For a normal city, softer hotel occupancy might have limited relevance to long-term rents. Tulum is different because so much housing was sold to investors on the assumption that tourists and temporary residents would keep absorbing new units.
When visitor demand disappoints, some of that housing inevitably spills into monthly rentals.
| Tourism indicator | Earlier comparison | Current comparison | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tulum hotel occupancy, H1 | 74.32% | 66.18% | -8.13 pp |
| Full-year hotel occupancy | 73.8% in 2024 | 69.1% in 2025 | -4.7 pp |
| Quintana Roo hotel occupancy, H1 | 75.82% | 72.87% | -2.95 pp |
| Tulum Airport international passengers, Q1 | Previous-year baseline | Current period | ~-34% |
Are lower Airbnb prices spilling into Tulum's long-term rental market?
Yes. Tulum's short-term rental market is currently under enough pricing pressure to make monthly and long-term leases more attractive to some owners.
AirDNA's latest Tulum dataset is particularly useful here. Its average daily rate is US$125, down 23% year over year. RevPAR, which combines price and occupancy, is down 9.7% to US$57.
Hosts have therefore been filling a larger share of the nights they make available while earning less from each available night.
That weakens the appeal of leaving a condo exclusively in the vacation-rental pool, especially once cleaning, management, utilities, platform fees and empty nights are included.
Tulum's housing stock makes the crossover easy. Many long-term listings already look like former vacation rentals: furnished one- and two-bedroom condos with pools, gyms, equipped kitchens, terraces and hotel-style common areas.
An owner who once needed US$150 or US$200 a night to make the investment work may eventually prefer a stable monthly tenant over chasing volatile bookings.
We cannot calculate exactly how many apartments have switched from Airbnb to long-term leases from public data alone. The economic incentive to do so has clearly increased.
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Is Tulum Airbnb occupancy recovering now?
Tulum Airbnb occupancy has improved in AirDNA's latest citywide dataset, but the recovery looks much weaker once we examine prices and the changing number of active listings.
AirDNA currently reports 46% occupancy, up 17.4% year over year. Taken alone, that sounds bullish.
Average daily rates fell 23%, however, and RevPAR still declined 9.7%. The number of active listings in AirDNA's dataset also fell an extraordinary 69.4% year over year to 4,130.
That last figure needs care. A fall in “active listings” does not necessarily mean thousands of condos disappeared. Owners may have reduced availability, changed platforms, paused listings or dropped outside AirDNA's active definition.
It does tell us that the denominator changed radically.
If fewer properties remain actively available, occupancy can rise without total demand booming. The simultaneous fall in ADR confirms that hosts still have limited pricing power.
So the Airbnb numbers currently fit the softer long-term rental story rather than contradicting it.
Are some Tulum neighborhoods still seeing rising rents?
Yes. Region 15 and a few smaller Tulum submarkets are still recording rent increases, while premium houses can perform very differently from ordinary apartments.
Region 15 is the cleanest apartment example. Propiedades.com puts its current average at about MXN 18,700 per month, up 6% since February 2025, with 91 active apartments.
Lúum Zama shows a much more dramatic 58% increase, but only eight active apartments sit behind that number. Las Palmas is up 27.7% with three listings.
Those tiny samples can change dramatically if a handful of luxury units enter or leave the portal. Treating them as evidence that Tulum rents have restarted a broad climb would be a stretch.
Property type also changes the picture. As seen above, Aldea Zama apartment rents are down 7.4%, while house rents there are up 23.8%.
That gap is revealing. The most crowded part of Tulum's rental market is the conventional investor condo, whereas scarce houses and distinctive properties can still command substantially higher prices.
For someone searching for a typical one- or two-bedroom apartment, the market feels much softer than it does for someone looking for a high-end family house.
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Can winter still make Tulum rents jump?
Yes. Tulum rents can still rise sharply during the winter season, especially for flexible leases, furnished monthly rentals and vacation properties.
This seasonal effect can easily create the impression that rents have started climbing again.
One current Tulum rental operator, for example, quotes a studio at roughly US$500 per month for a four-month stay between May and November and US$725 for a comparable four-month winter stay. That is a 45% seasonal premium.
Its one-bedroom pricing shows a similar gap, moving from roughly US$725 during the cheaper period to US$1,075 in the winter season.
Holiday villas can swing much more than that around Christmas and New Year.
Those prices make sense for temporary accommodation because owners are giving up the possibility of selling high-priced holiday nights. A normal 12-month residential lease behaves differently.
Anyone comparing January monthly rentals with September listings can therefore see a big “rent increase” even if the underlying annual market is getting cheaper.
For this article, the multi-month neighborhood trends tell us more about where Tulum rents are going than a seasonal quote during peak tourism.
Do Tulum renters have more negotiating power now?
Yes. Tulum apartment renters have more negotiating power these days because large amounts of similar inventory are competing for the same tenants.
The best leverage is in neighborhoods such as La Veleta and Aldea Zama, where hundreds of apartments are currently advertised.
A tenant looking at a conventional furnished condo does not need the entire Tulum market to collapse. Five or six genuinely comparable alternatives are enough to challenge an ambitious asking rent.
That changes how we should read portal prices. MXN 20,000 on a listing tells us what the owner wants. It does not tell us what the eventual lease will be signed at.
The current market also gives longer-term tenants something valuable to offer landlords: certainty. A 12-month renter means fewer empty weeks, fewer cleaning turnovers, less platform management and no need to continually find new guests.
Owners who bought during the boom may resist cutting advertised rents because their mortgage, purchase price or expected return has not changed. Competing landlords do not care about that owner's cost basis. If another similar condo rents for less, the tenant has an alternative.
In practice, the rental market can soften before every asking-price statistic fully reflects it.
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What would make Tulum rents start rising again?
Tulum rents could start rising again if demand begins absorbing the existing condo glut faster than new properties and former vacation rentals reach the market.
Tourism would need to strengthen first. We would want to see Tulum hotel occupancy recovering consistently rather than remaining well below last year's level, together with renewed airport passenger growth.
The housing market would also need to clear some of its excess inventory. The gap between 13,266 units under construction at the peak of the boom and only 1,711 annual sales in 2025 shows how much adjustment is still required.
Permanent resident demand could help. Tulum continues to attract workers, expatriates and lifestyle migrants, and infrastructure such as the airport and Tren Maya can support longer-term growth. Yet residential demand has to be large enough to absorb thousands of investment properties before landlords regain broad pricing power.
Supply could also shrink without a huge demand boom. Owners may sell, stop renting or hold properties off the market. AirDNA's recent contraction in active short-term listings shows how quickly the visible supply pool can change.
For now, several of the conditions we would normally associate with sustained rent increases are missing at the same time: the largest apartment neighborhoods are cheaper, tourism occupancy has weakened, nightly Airbnb prices are lower and housing supply remains unusually heavy.
A strong winter could lift temporary rents. A broad Tulum rental rebound needs much more than one good season.
So, are rents still rising in Tulum?
No. Tulum rents are no longer rising broadly, and the latest evidence points to a genuine correction in the city's apartment market.
Propiedades.com's current citywide apartment series is 5.6% below February 2025. More importantly, the decline appears in the markets where renters actually have substantial choice: La Veleta is down 8.6%, Centro 8.2%, Aldea Zama 7.4% and Tumben Kaa 4%.
As pointed out above, we should not push that conclusion too far. Region 15 is still rising. Some tiny submarkets show much larger gains. Houses have held up better than apartments, and Aldea Zama houses are currently far more expensive than they were in early 2025. Winter can also produce sharp temporary increases.
Still, the wider market has changed.
Tulum expanded its housing pipeline from 1,466 units under construction in 2017 to 13,266 in 2023. Annual sales then fell by roughly half between 2023 and 2025. Meanwhile, official tourism data show Tulum's hotel occupancy weakening more sharply than Quintana Roo's overall market, while AirDNA shows short-term rental nightly rates down 23% year over year.
Put those pieces together and the answer becomes fairly decisive. Too many apartments are competing for renters while the tourism engine that was supposed to absorb much of that supply is running below its earlier pace.
Tulum can therefore remain expensive without remaining a rising-rent market. Today, the typical apartment renter has more choice and more leverage than during the boom years, while landlords increasingly have to compete on price, quality and lease terms.
Broad rent growth probably does not return until Tulum absorbs a meaningful part of its excess housing stock or demand accelerates enough to overwhelm that supply. We are not there yet.
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OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether rents are still rising in Tulum by separating the market into the parts that can move differently: apartments, houses, short-term rentals and seasonal furnished leases. We focused on the direction of rents rather than whether Tulum feels expensive in absolute terms.
We started with recent residential asking-rent movements and compared neighborhoods individually rather than relying only on one citywide average. We gave more weight to areas with substantial active inventory, including La Veleta, Aldea Zama, Tulum Centro, Tumben Kaa and Region 15, and treated very small samples such as Lúum Zama and Las Palmas more cautiously.
Apartments and houses were analyzed separately because they currently behave quite differently. The much larger inventory of investor-owned apartments makes that market more representative of the rental pressure faced by a typical tenant, while scarce houses can show much stronger local price movements.
We then tested the rental data against housing supply. Construction, annual sales and project-absorption figures were used together to judge whether the large amount of available rental inventory reflects a wider housing imbalance rather than a short-lived change in advertised prices.
Tourism indicators were used as a demand check rather than as a substitute for rental data. Tulum hotel occupancy and airport passenger figures help show whether visitor demand is growing fast enough to absorb a property market that remains unusually dependent on tourists, seasonal residents and investors.
For short-term rentals, we considered occupancy together with average daily rate, RevPAR and active listings. Occupancy on its own can give a misleading picture when hosts are cutting prices or when the number of properties counted as active changes sharply.
We also separated seasonality from the broader trend. Winter monthly rents can be substantially higher than low-season rents, particularly for furnished and flexible leases, so seasonal quotes were used to illustrate that effect rather than to determine the direction of the annual residential market.
Key residential rental sources include Propiedades.com for La Veleta apartments, Aldea Zama apartments, Tulum Centro apartments, Tumben Kaa apartments, Region 15 Kukulcan apartments, and the corresponding Propiedades.com house-rental series for La Veleta, Aldea Zama and Tulum Centro.
For the demand and supply cross-checks, we used SITURQ's official hotel-occupancy data, AirDNA's Tulum short-term-rental data, AFAC airport statistics, DataTur's AFAC-based passenger database, and El Economista's InfoHabitat/Softec-based analysis of Tulum's housing construction, sales and absorption. Seasonal furnished-rental pricing was checked against Casa Mtl Tulum's published multi-month rates.
The final judgment comes from the overlap between these datasets rather than from any one headline number. We looked for agreement between neighborhood rents, active inventory, housing supply, tourism demand and short-term-rental economics, while keeping the pockets where the evidence diverges visible rather than averaging them away.
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