A report prepared by the Panama Report created to reflect on the current situation of the real estate market in Panama is an attempt to document real estate statistics in Panama. The following is an article from nuwireinvestor.com on the reasons for this document and its necessity in Panama.
"Investors seeking a coherent set of statistics regarding the Panama City, Panama real estate market may find themselves stymied by the 2009 Panama Real Estate Report. The annual report, which is produced by The Panama Report website offers a conflicting set of conclusions as to where one of the major Central American markets is headed.Read further here
The report notes that Panama City’s lack of a Multiple Listing System complicates the process of gathering data. “They like it this way,” Costa Rica and Panama real estate professional Casey Halloran says in the report. “There is power in hoarding information and if it were free to everyone, some would stand to lose power.”
To circumvent the lack of an MLS, The Panama Report was produced with the assistance of Reveal Real Estate, a market research firm which specializes in Central American real estate data.
“While it’s been projected now for over a year that Panama’s market is due to bust, there still exists, as of May of 2009, a dimension of incongruity between buyers and sellers: sellers want to sell high, buyers want to buy low, and no one really knows an appropriate price,” the report reads. “Unlike more developed markets where a sense of reality and facts preside, we believe Panama’s disparity between buyers and sellers to be attributed to one main liability and that is the inability to obtain real comparative selling data. In other words, buyers and sellers aren’t on the same page because…well, there’s no same page to be on.”
Sales Down, Listing Prices Up
In one of the Panama City market’s most apparent contradictions, listing prices seem to have increased even in the face of fewer sales. As of May, the average price per square meter was $2,742.07, a 2.88 percent increase from $2,665.25 a year earlier.
“Some experts wager that these numbers represent the maximum peak in a curve that will soon begin its downward slope (as supply continues to increase and demand appears to be tapering off): if true, these would represent the most expensive prices Panama has ever and will ever (at least for a long time) experience,” the report reads. “Others believe that prices have increased due to the draw from Latin Americans who have difficulty entering more northern markets.”
