Cancun Real Estate for Sale

Cancun real estate is a different market from Tulum, and buyers who look at both usually want opposite things. Cancun is a full size city with the busiest international airport in Mexico attached to it, and nine of our ten live listings here are already built.

Puerto Cancun

Almost everything we sell here sits in Puerto Cancun, and it is worth understanding why. It is a gated master planned district on the lagoon side between the hotel zone and downtown, built around a working marina, an eighteen hole golf course and a canal system that a good number of the residences look onto.

Inside the gate there is a shopping center, restaurants along the marina, a beach club, jogging and cycling paths through mangrove, and security at the entrances. Outside it, you are five minutes from Avenida Bonampak and the downtown restaurants, and around fifteen from Cancun International Airport.

That airport is the practical argument for Cancun over anywhere else on this coast. It runs direct flights to most major North American cities and a long list of European and South American ones, year round, several times a day. For an owner who wants to arrive on a Friday evening and be at the property by seven, nothing else here competes.

The rest of the city

The Zona Hotelera is the barrier island, fourteen miles of hotels, condominiums and beach clubs along Boulevard Kukulcan, with the Caribbean on one side and the Nichupte lagoon on the other. Residential stock there is older and denser than Puerto Cancun and it trades on the beach rather than on the amenities.

Cumbres and the northern residential colonias are where the city actually lives: gated subdivisions, schools, supermarkets, and family houses at a fraction of the coastal price.

What is for sale

Eight condos, two houses and one beachfront residence. Nine of the ten are finished and one is pre-construction. Three bedrooms is the most common layout by a wide margin, the median size is 2,476 sq ft (230 m²) and the median asking price is $1,575,000 USD, running from $500,000 USD for a house with a private pool in Cumbres to $3,235,000 USD for an ocean view residence in Puerto Cancun.

The SLS residences account for most of the book here, across the beach, marina and harbour buildings, alongside a marina villa and an apartment in the hotel zone.

Who it suits

Owners who fly in often and want the journey to be short. Buyers who want branded residence services, a concierge and a managed building rather than a villa they have to run. And rental owners who want the year round occupancy that comes with an airport doing this volume.

It suits families too, more than Tulum does. International schools, hospitals and everything else a household needs are established here and have been for decades.

What to watch

Cancun is a city, with city traffic and city density. If you came to the Riviera Maya for jungle and quiet, Puerto Cancun will feel like a nice apartment in a nice district rather than an escape.

Buying inside a branded or serviced building means maintenance fees, and they are not small at this level. Ask for the current monthly figure in writing, ask what it covers and ask how it has moved over the last three years.

Coastal ownership within fifty kilometres of the shoreline means the fideicomiso, a bank trust that gives foreign buyers full ownership rights. It is routine, it is well understood here, and your notario, the government appointed lawyer who acts as the legal authority on the transaction, will handle it.

The figures on this page are asking prices from our own current listings. They are not closed transactions and they are not comparables.