Look up how housing prices are doing in Quintana Roo and you will meet two stories that seem incompatible. The official index has been climbing for years. Meanwhile, anyone trying to sell a condo in Tulum will tell you the market has stalled.
Both are right, and understanding why saves you from deciding with the wrong number.
What the official index actually measures
The SHF Housing Price Index is published quarterly by Sociedad Hipotecaria Federal, base 100 in Q1 2005. It is built from appraisals of homes bought with a registered mortgage.
That sentence holds the key: if the transaction did not go through a registered mortgage, it is not in the index.
What that leaves out
On the Riviera Maya it leaves out a very large part of the market:
- cash purchases, which in resort areas are the rule rather than the exception;
- pre-sales, paid in instalments to the developer rather than with a mortgage;
- the foreign buyer, who usually finances at home or pays directly;
- land: lots and plots are not housing and do not count.
So the index can describe one part of the market precisely while saying nothing about the part you care about if you are buying a beachfront condo.
What the index is good for
As a long-run thermometer it is excellent, and it is the only series with twenty years of history, published methodology and quarterly updates. Use it to:
- compare Quintana Roo against the national average on the same yardstick;
- see whether a municipality is pulling ahead of or falling behind its state;
- place the cycle: where we are relative to five or ten years ago.
What it cannot do is price a specific property, or tell you how long it will take to sell.
One detail worth knowing
The index publishes figures for Benito Juárez and Solidaridad, but not for Tulum. We verified this in the open-data file for the second quarter of 2026: Tulum is not among the municipalities with its own series.
That is neither our oversight nor SHF's: it reflects that Tulum has too few registered-mortgage transactions to build a reliable index. And that fact alone tells you something about the market.
How we read the two figures here
In this register, series are published separately and with their source, never merged into a single number called "the market". When the index rises while activity falls, it is not a contradiction: you are looking at two different things wearing the same name.
The useful question is not "did it go up or down?" but "does this figure include transactions like mine?". The answer usually changes the conclusion.
