There is a quiet narrative that has taken hold across Jamaica, one that travels easily from roadside conversations to WhatsApp threads, from agents’ offices to family gatherings. Property prices, it is often said, do not really go down here, not meaningfully, not for long, not in the way global headlines might suggest. For the most part, experience appears to support that belief. Over the last three decades, Jamaica has endured financial crises, recessions, storms, and a pandemic, yet its property market has displayed a peculiar resilience, a tendency to soften, pause, or diverge, but rarely collapse outright.
But beneath that confidence lies a more complicated truth, one shaped as much by what cannot be measured as by what can.
Jamaica does not have a clean, uninterrupted, widely published 30-year national house price index. There is no single line that traces the market neatly from past to present. Instead, the story is assembled from fragments, central bank reports, mortgage data, tr…
