The Puerto Vallarta Real Estate Market: Where Things Stand as of September 10, 2026
Updated: 34 minutes ago
The Puerto Vallarta Real Estate Market: Where Things Stand as of September 10, 2026
If you've heard that Puerto Vallarta condo sales are “down 22% this year,” that headline is technically true and almost entirely misleading. Here's the real story, based on live AMPI/MLSVallarta data through September 10, comparing this year to the same period in 2025.
The one-line summary
The PV market isn't moving as one block this year. It's split two ways: by property type (condos vs. houses) and by how a home is being sold (already-built resale vs. still-under-construction pre-sale). Resale condos and top-end South Shore houses are genuinely strong. Condo pre-construction and the broader house market are softening — not collapsing, but taking longer to sell.
Condos: the “down 22%” headline is hiding the real story
Blend everything together and condo units sold are down 22% year-over-year, with dollar volume down 18%. That's the number that gets repeated. But condos are actually two very different markets stapled together, and pulling them apart tells you what's actually happening: Resale condos (already built) are having their best year yet. Units sold are up about 17%, dollar volume is up about 17%, and the median sale price is up 9%. These homes are selling at 96%+ of asking price in a median of six months — that's a healthy, liquid market by any standard.
Pre-construction condos (still being built) are down sharply. Units sold have fallen about 57%, and dollar volume is down the same amount. The median time to sell a pre-construction unit has more than doubled, from 221 days a year ago to 464 days now — even though these units are still nominally closing near full asking price. That combination — near-full-price closings, but taking twice as long to find a buyer — is the clearest sign that there's simply more pre-construction inventory sitting on the market than buyers are absorbing right now.
Put simply: resale, which is what actually sets comparable values for your home, is accelerating. The overall “condos down” story is a story about a shrinking pre-construction segment, not a weakening market.
Where the resale strength is showing up: Bucerias, Nuevo Vallarta West, the Hotel Zone, and Flamingos all saw meaningfully more units change hands than a year ago, with prices rising alongside the extra volume. Centro South's sold count jumped from 58 to 86 — more mid-priced units trading, not softer values. Nuevo Vallarta West stands out with resale volume up 32%.
Where pre-construction is pulling back hardest: Bucerias and Francisco Villa West, the two most active pre-construction corridors a year ago, both saw unit sales fall by more than half, with real price discounting in Bucerias (-21.6%). Marina's closing count collapsed from 71 to 13, though its startling +127% average price there is a handful of high-end towers closing, not the market repricing. South Shore had zero recorded pre-construction closings this year, versus five last year.
Houses: this is where the real softening is
If condos are the strong half of the market, houses are the soft half. Active inventory is up 14% while sales are down 4% and dollar volume is down 10%. But this isn't a value collapse — median sale price is essentially flat (-0.6%), and homes that do sell are actually clearing closer to asking price than a year ago (96.7% vs. 95.4%). The real cost is time: median days on market climbed 16%, to 222 days.
The exception: South Shore. While the rest of the house market cools, South Shore houses nearly doubled their sold count (9 to 16) and average price rose 27%, consistent with continued strength at the very top of the market. Nuevo Vallarta West, the largest house sub-market in this report, also grew in both volume and price.
The demand backdrop: mixed, but not alarming
Airport traffic is down — passenger counts through the airport are running about 12.6% below last year, with the worst month (March, -24.4%) tied to a late-February security incident and Spirit Airlines' shutdown of its LAX/Dallas/Houston routes in May. But the trend has been improving steadily since March, and August posted the smallest year-over-year gap of the downturn.
Hotel occupancy is holding up better than the airport numbers suggest — staying in a healthy 68-71% range through summer, a few points above Mexico's national benchmark, with peak periods like Semana Santa essentially sold out. Part of the explanation: the new Guadalajara-to-PV highway, finished in December 2024, cut driving time from 4.5-5 hours to about 2.5, pulling in more domestic Mexican visitors who don't show up in the airport passenger counts.
Flights are genuinely more expensive this year — Spirit's exit and roughly doubled jet fuel costs (tied to a conflict involving Iran that began in February) are pushing fares up. A representative 12-month average round-trip on KAYAK runs $581, not the $228-355 deal-alert fares that circulated on travel blogs this spring. New capacity from Southwest, Porter, and WestJet could ease this over the next year, but that's a forward-looking possibility, not today's reality.
Short-term rental income should be underwritten conservatively. Occupancy estimates across data providers range from the high-30s% to high-50s%, with nightly rates flat to softening as listing supply keeps growing (+5.8% year-over-year). The realistic planning number for a new rental purchase is 42-50% occupancy — not the 60%+ figures sometimes used in developer sales presentations.
Cost of living: what snowbirds are feeling is real, with a twist
Mexican inflation spiked to a 19-month high of 4.59% in March — right in the middle of peak snowbird season — driven by food, restaurants, and lodging costs. By August it had cooled to 3.26%, comfortably within the central bank's target range, but a visitor who was here from January through April lived through several months of costs rising well above the eventual annual average. That's a plausible explanation for the “everything got more expensive” feeling, even though the full-year number looks unremarkable.
For Canadian buyers specifically, the squeeze is coming from an unexpected direction: the Canadian dollar has actually held up fine against the US dollar this year (down only about 2%), but has slid about 6.6% against the Mexican peso. Since PV real estate is priced and closes in US dollars, the cost of buying a home here has barely moved for Canadian buyers — it's day-to-day peso-denominated spending (restaurants, groceries, taxis) that's gotten noticeably more expensive in loonie terms.
Gasoline is also a real, rising cost for anyone driving regularly — pump prices are running above the government's voluntary price cap, and regular gasoline in Mexico now costs roughly 30% more than typical US prices.
The bottom line
Puerto Vallarta real estate isn't telling one simple story this year. Resale condos and top-tier South Shore houses are strong. Condo pre-construction and the broader house market are softening on time-to-sell, even as prices mostly hold. The demand backdrop is mixed but not alarming — fewer visitors are flying in, but more are driving in from Guadalajara, and hotel occupancy has held up through it all.
For buyers, sellers, or anyone trying to make sense of what their property is actually worth right now, the details matter more than the headline. Segment, location, and realistic rental assumptions will tell you far more than any single “market is up” or “market is down” number.
If you would like the full detailed report, reach out to me via WhatsApp 52-322-274-7775 or by email at nik@mexhome.com
Thinking about buying, selling, or just want a straight-talking read on where the Puerto Vallarta market actually stands? I'm always happy to talk through the numbers.
Nik Valcic, AMPI/NAR
MexHome Real Estate — Zona Romántica, Puerto Vallarta
nik@mexhome.com · +52-322-274-7775
Sales data: AMPI/MLSVallarta, January 1 – September 10, 2026 vs. 2025. Resale/pre-construction splits are allocated estimates, not an exact reconciliation. Tourism, currency, and inflation figures are drawn from public sources including GAP, INEGI, Banco de México, AirDNA, and AirROI. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
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