A market terminal for the people who actually decide here. We track what moves prices — air traffic, the exchange rate, local lending — and read it straight, including the parts that don't fit a sales pitch.
Latest data through June 2026 · updated as each official release lands
Our composite of the three demand engines — foreign tourism, domestic tourism and local home-buying — indexed to 2019 = 100. One number for whether real demand for the region is expanding or cooling.
113.4
▲ +3.1% YoY · cycle high
2025 · 2019 = 100
Riviera Maya Demand Index (2019 = 100)
latest 2025: 113
Analyst take Here's the read the airport headline misses: the Demand Index sits at 113.4 in 2025 — a cycle high, above even the 2023 tourism peak. Foreign arrivals cooled, but local home-lending (▲ +19.9%) more than made up the difference. Total demand for the region isn't falling — it's rotating from the tourist to the resident buyer. That rotation is the single most important thing happening in this market right now, and it's invisible if you only watch passenger counts.
29.5M
Cancún passengers 2025
-10.0%
vs 2023 peak
1.2M
Tulum passengers 2025
191.2M
Mexico total 2025
The monthly pulse
The freshest read we have — the latest month against the same month a year earlier. This is the number that turns first when the market does.
-11.5%
Cancún 2026-06 vs a year earlier
-13.1%
Cancún international, YoY
-44.8%
Tulum 2026-06 vs a year earlier
-63.2%
Tulum international, YoY
Mexico is growing. The Riviera Maya isn't — yet.
The most important thing in this whole page: national air travel keeps climbing, while Cancún — the region's gateway — sits below its 2023 peak. The current softness is regional, not national. Both lines below start at 100 in 2016.
National air travel vs Cancún — indexed
Mexico (all airports) Cancúnindexed to 2016 = 100
Mexico moved 191.2M air passengers in 2025, a record. Cancún, at 29.5M, is -10.0% off its 2023 high of 32.8M. A gateway cooling while the country grows is a demand lull, not a structural decline.
Analyst take National traffic is running ▲ +0.7% over the trailing year while Cancún is ▼ -3.5% — a 4.2-point spread. Read plainly: capital is rotating toward the north and centre (Monterrey, the new Mexico City airports) faster than the Caribbean this cycle. That's a timing signal for entry, not a verdict on the destination.
The exchange rate and who shows up
The Riviera Maya's buyers are overwhelmingly American, Canadian and European, so the exchange rate is a demand variable, not a footnote. Here is the cleanest version of that link — Cancún's international arrivals against the peso itself, each on its own axis. Volume and price kept separate: when the peso firms, a holiday and a purchase both cost more, in every source currency at once.
Cancún international arrivals vs the peso (USD/MXN)
Intl passengers (left) USD/MXN (right)
The link is real but not mechanical: over 246 months of monthly data, Cancún's international traffic and USD/MXN move together with a correlation of 0.50 — 0.63 once seasonality is stripped out. The relationship is positive over the full window and strengthens once seasonality is removed. It is real but not a simple lever: USD/MXN and Cancún arrivals largely reflect the same growth cycle rather than one driving the other, and the pandemic years distort any single-number read. Correlation is not causation.
And it is not one currency but three. Indexed to 2019, the peso has firmed against the dollar, the Canadian dollar and the euro alike — the same cost pressure bearing on every source market at the same time. USD is tracked to 2006, CAD and EUR to 2018 — the window each currency holds a clean, continuous series.
The three foreign-buyer currencies vs the peso, indexed (2019 = 100)
US dollar Canadian dollar Euroindexed to 2019 = 100
A stronger peso raises the entry cost for a US, Canadian or European buyer alike — yet it also means each is buying into a cooler market, which historically is the better entry. Every project on this site is contracted in pesos and shown live in USD, CAD and EUR, so the real number is never hidden.
The drivers of demand
"Tourism" is not one thing, and it is not the whole story. Demand for Riviera Maya real estate rests on three distinct legs, each with its own cycle: the foreign visitor (Cancún's international arrivals), the Mexican visitor — domestic tourism, the larger and steadier base that most foreign-focused analysis ignores, still about 34% of Cancún traffic — and resident credit, the mortgages Quintana Roo residents actually close. All indexed to their starting year.
The drivers of demand: foreign visitors, Mexican visitors, resident credit
Foreign visitors (Cancún intl) Mexican visitors (Cancún domestic) Home loans placed (Quintana Roo)indexed to 2019 = 100
Because the three legs run on different cycles, weakness in one is cushioned by the others: as foreign arrivals cooled, domestic travel and resident lending kept pulling supply through. A market resting on a single leg has no such shock absorber. Beneath the three visible legs sits a fourth — the local economy itself, Quintana Roo GDP and value-added by municipality — the ground the other three stand on, which the desk reads municipality by municipality.
Analyst take The cycle's quiet tell: foreign arrivals are ▼ -3.5% while home lending in Quintana Roo is ▲ +19.9%. Demand isn't leaving the region — it is rotating from the tourist to the resident buyer. Divergences like this, where the headline and the underlying signal disagree, are where informed capital tends to move first.
The domestic engine has two dimensions — how many loans, and how big. Read together they describe the financed buyer: volume shows the depth of demand, average size shows where that demand sits.
Home loans in Quintana Roo — how many, and how big
Loans placed (left) Avg size (MXN M) (right)
Quintana Roo closed 30K home loans in 2025 (up from 30K in 2006), and the average financed home has risen from $0.2M to $0.9M MXN. That average is the market's centre of gravity: product priced near it meets the deepest pool of mortgage-ready buyers, while product priced far above it is competing for cash, not credit. Where that centre sits against local incomes is the affordability question we model municipality by municipality.
The cost of money — and the economy underneath
Prices don't move on tourism alone. They move on what a mortgage costs, what it costs to build, and how much credit the region actually absorbs. Here's that layer, as of 2026-08-07 — the resident-buyer side of the market most listings never show.
Interbank benchmark · TIIE 28
6.81%
CETES 6.2% · a reference, not the mortgage
Effective mortgage rate
11.33%
CAT 13.80% · what a buyer actually pays
QRoo home loans 2025
30K
$26.0B · ▲ +19.9% YoY
Construction cost index
147
▲ +4.5% YoY · +47% since 2019
Quintana Roo labour market: 2.98% unemployment, minimum wage $290 MXN/day — the income side of the affordability equation.
What a mortgage actually costs in Mexico — effective rate, monthly since 2014
latest 2026-06: 11.3%
The rate a buyer is quoted (TIIE, ~6.8%) is not the rate a buyer pays. The effective mortgage rate averages 11.33% and the all-in cost (CAT) 13.80%. That gap — bank spread and fees — is what actually decides who qualifies.
One municipal signal, read with care: new borrowing by each local government. In the latest municipal accounts, Solidaridad (Playa del Carmen) took on $888M of new financing and Tulum$113M, while Benito Juárez (Cancún) added none. New debt is not infrastructure investment — borrowing can fund capital works or simply payroll and operating costs, and only the expense breakdown tells which. Separating productive spending from deficit financing, municipality by municipality, is exactly the distinction a headline number hides and the desk reads.
Analyst take The read most buyers miss: home lending in Quintana Roo is ▲ +19.9% even with the effective mortgage rate near 11.3% — credit is expanding in a higher-cost environment, which means this demand runs on conviction, not cheap money. Whether local incomes can carry those loans is the affordability question — one we model municipality by municipality, because a mortgage a household cannot service is not demand, it is a future default.
The cost to build
What it costs to build sets the floor under prices. Construction costs are up 47% since 2019 — which is why new supply is priced where it is, and why finished, well-located stock holds its value. This is an index of that cost pressure over time, not any single project's budget.
Construction cost index (Jul 2019 = 100)
latest 2025-07: 147
When building gets more expensive, two things follow: replacement cost rises (supporting the value of what already exists), and marginal projects stall — exactly the developments a rescue fund looks at.
Where the Riviera Maya sits nationally
Cancún is the second-busiest airport in the country — bigger than Guadalajara or Monterrey. The airports growing fastest right now are in the north and centre; the Caribbean is the one taking a breather. Hover any bar for the year-over-year change.
Mexico's busiest airports (2025)
Riviera Mayapassengers, latest full year · % = YoY
Cancún airport — the demand gauge
Cancún is how most visitors and foreign buyers reach Tulum and Playa del Carmen, so its traffic is the cleanest read on real demand. It peaked in 2023 and has eased since. The gap between the two lines is international traffic — the resilient part.
Cancún airport — monthly passengers
Total Domesticgap = international · latest 2026-06: 2.1M
Tulum's new airport — the reality check
The airport that was supposed to change everything opened in December 2023. Two and a half years in, it runs far below its design capacity, and its international traffic has been falling through 2026. Useful evidence that big infrastructure pays off over a decade, not in its first months.
Total Domesticgap = international · latest 2026-06: 48K
Fuller planes, fewer of them
A subtler signal: how many passengers each Cancún flight carries. When airlines trim routes but keep the profitable ones, load per flight holds up even as total traffic softens — a sign the demand that remains is real, not fragile.
Cancún — passengers per flight (load proxy)
latest 2026-06: 152 pax/flight
Analyst take Load per flight is holding near the top of its range even as total traffic eases — airlines are cutting frequency, not abandoning the route. Capacity discipline like this usually protects pricing on the ground far better than a raw passenger count suggests.
The calendar that runs this market
Rental income, resale timing, even when to close — all bend to the season. Here's the real shape of Cancún demand across the year, averaged over the last five. 100 is an average month.
When people actually come — Cancún seasonality
above-average month below100 = average month
Analyst take Dec runs about 16% above an average month, Sep about 20% below. For a buyer, the practical edge is in the trough: the strongest negotiating leverage, and the best availability, sit in the low-season months — not when everyone else is here.
What this costs you, in your currency
We price in Mexican pesos and show the live equivalent in USD, CAD, and EUR on every project — plus a chart of what a fixed peso price has actually cost in your currency over time. Same discipline as this page: the real number, nothing hidden.
What Neural Properties Research tracks, and how straight we play it — without giving away the desk.
What we trackAir traffic for every Mexican airport (monthly), USD/MXN/CAD/EUR, and Quintana Roo home-lending — plus our own cross-reads.
Coverage67 airports · Riviera Maya focus (Cancún, Tulum, Cozumel) · national series from 2016.
CadenceRebuilt automatically as each official release lands — daily where the source updates daily (the peso), monthly where it does not (air traffic, lending). Official series carry a normal lag, so the latest point is the last closed period, not today.
BasisBuilt from official Mexican aviation, central-bank and housing-finance records. Which series, how we normalize and seasonally adjust them, and how we map them to on-the-ground pricing is proprietary and stays in-house — that method is the edge of the desk, not a footnote.
HonestyThis is our read of the market. We publish it because we act on it — and we can be wrong. Not a forecast, not investment advice.
This is the public layer. The deal layer is where the desk works.
Everything on this page is our open read of the market. On a specific asset — a unit, a hotel, a full building or a parcel — the desk works one level deeper: zone-by-zone absorption, price-per-m² benchmarks, the developer's delivery record, the title and trust structure, and the deal-level numbers that decide whether a price is fair. If you are moving real capital in the Riviera Maya, that is the conversation to have.
Built by Neural Properties Research from official Mexican aviation, central-bank and housing-finance records. Which series, how they're normalized, and how we cross-read them against on-the-ground pricing is our own work and stays in-house — that method is the point of the desk. Latest data through June 2026, rebuilt as each official release lands. This is our read of the market; markets move and we can be wrong. Historical data is not a forecast, this page is informational and not investment advice, and prices are contracted in Mexican pesos.
