House Hunting in the Cayman Islands: A Compact Castle in the Caribbean

Market Overview

The Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory known the world over as a business haven thanks to its near total lack of taxation, is home to around 65,000 residents. Jeanette Totten, a broker with ERA Cayman Islands and the outgoing president of the Cayman Islands Real Estate Brokers Association (CIREBA), said the years leading up to the pandemic were a strong seller’s market, with vacation-home prices growing an average of 15 percent a year.

“We were expecting a big increase when all this hit,” she added. “We were really going gangbusters for the last two years. Prices were continuing to go up and up and up.”

This year, she and Ms. Nugent said, prices have remained stable as high-end homeowners wait out the coronavirus. “It’s just holding firm right now,” Ms. Totten said. “People who own here are very wealthy, so this is a second, a third, a fourth home. They’re not losing it to the bank. This is part of their portfolio and they’re just holding onto it. And they’re riding out the pandemic storm. So prices haven’t dropped.”

Still, there are more available vacation homes and condos than buyers this year — a reversal from 2019 — Ms. Totten said, owing in large part to homeowners who relied on rental income now deciding to liquidate. “With no rental income since the end of March and no end in sight,” she said, “these owners are feeling the need to sell.”

Overall, the Caymans have seen residential prices rise, from an average of about $942,000 in 2019 to $1.16 million in 2020, according to data from CIREBA. But the number of sales has fallen, from 512 sales in 2019 to 358 through November 2020, as has the total value of those sales, from about $343 million in all of 2019 to about $311 million this year. (The Cayman Islands dollar is the territory’s official currency, but the U.S. dollar is widely accepted.)