Housing Inventory and Months of Supply in San Miguel de Allende

29.6 months

Average months of inventory, Jan-May 2026

Against 17.6 months in the same period of 2025. The same source calls 15 to 18 months normal for this market.

745

Active MLS listings, June 2026

Down from 860 in May. The source describes the fall as 81 properties; 860 minus 745 is 115.

2 of 6

Months of 2026 with a published listing count

January to April were never published by anyone. There is no monthly inventory series for this city.

0

Price bands with a published inventory figure

The same firm says several bands sit at post-2008 highs and has published no band-level number.

Search for months of inventory in San Miguel de Allende and two incompatible answers come back on the same page of results. One says supply has normalised to roughly eleven months. The other, from the only firm publishing closed-sale counts for this town, says months of supply averaged 29.6 across the first five months of 2026, against 17.6 in the same period of 2025, and that in several price bands inventory is as high as it has been since the period following the 2008 financial crisis.

Both claims trace to the same brokerage. That is the reconciliation and it takes a paragraph. The rest of this page is the part nobody has written: what the measure means, which published counts can be checked, and why a reading that would look like an emergency in a mortgage-financed suburb is close to ordinary in a cash second-home market.

One caveat covers every number below. San Miguel de Allende has no public transaction registry, AMPI’s local chapter publishes no statistics, and the local MLS issues no aggregate reports. Every inventory and closing figure here comes from one brokerage’s view of a partially subscribed MLS. It is the best data that exists and nobody can audit it.

The claims currently in circulation

The eleven-month figure is not fabricated. It is stale, and it has a second problem: it does not agree with its own source. The firm that produced it later reported 17.6 months as the average for January to May 2025. Eleven months for 2025 and 17.6 months for the first five months of 2025 cannot both be readings of the same series. One is a snapshot and the other a multi-month average, or one was revised. No methodology page has ever been published, so the difference cannot be resolved from outside.

What months of supply actually measures

Months of supply is active listings divided by the average number of sales per month over some recent window. The unit is months, and the question it answers is narrow: at the recent selling pace, and assuming nothing new comes to market, how long would the standing stock take to clear.

It is not days on market, which measures how long an individual listing has been for sale. A market can carry high months of supply while good listings sell quickly and a long tail sits, and the two measures then disagree. No days-on-market series from MLS or closed-sale records exists here at all.

It is not a price measure either. High supply is associated with weak pricing, but the association is not the measurement, and this city has no repeat-sales index, no hedonic index and no sale-to-list series. The link between the 2026 build and clearing prices is inference.

And it is not a measure of distress. That is the misreading this page exists to correct, and the reason lies in who owns the stock.

The structural point that matters most is that the ratio has two moving parts and cannot tell you which one moved. It rises when listings increase, when sales fall, or both. Through May 2026 the San Miguel move was overwhelmingly a supply event: active listings rose 45 percent year on year, from 593 to 860, while closings through May were reported at 197 against 190, up about 3.7 percent. The June post reverses the demand side, reporting 186 closings through June against 220 a year earlier. Those two posts cannot both be right. If the June figure is the correct one, part of the build is falling demand rather than rising supply, and the composition of the change is unknown.

The readings, and how far back they go

Against the firm’s own normal range, 29.6 months is between 1.6 and 2.0 times the top and bottom of that range. Against the eleven-month figure still being quoted, it is nearly triple. Both comparisons come from the same publisher.

The 29.6 does not reproduce from the published inputs

Months of supply is simple arithmetic, and the only firm publishing it also publishes listing counts and closing counts. Those can be divided. They do not produce the published answer.

The two right-hand columns are ours, not the firm’s, and the gap between them is the point. In both years the naive computation lands well below what was published, and in 2026 the gap is 7.8 months, larger than the entire difference between a normal market here and a slow one.

Several explanations would close it and none can be tested. The published figure is an average of five monthly readings, each computed against its own listing count, and the counts for January to April 2026 were never published. The trailing window for the sales pace may be twelve months rather than year to date, which in a falling market raises the ratio. The listing universe may include land and condominiums that the closing count excludes, or the reverse.

We are not saying 29.6 is wrong. It comes from data we cannot see, from the only party who can see it, and it points in a direction that costs that party money to publish. We are saying it cannot be checked, that the discrepancy runs the same way in both years, and that a statistic quoted to one decimal place with no disclosed inputs is an indication rather than a measurement.

The monthly series that does not exist

Two of the six months of 2026 have a listing count attached to them.

Two datapoints four weeks apart are not a series. They establish no trend, no peak and no seasonal pattern, and any page charting San Miguel inventory month by month through 2026 has filled the gaps with something other than published data.

June: 860 to 745, and the three readings of it

The June fall is the most quoted recent number in this market and the least interpretable. Start with its arithmetic. The source describes the decline as a reduction of 81 properties, and 860 minus 745 is 115. The 34-unit discrepancy has not been corrected, which matters less as an error than as a measure of how much weight one monthly reading can carry.

These three cannot be separated from anything published. The firm’s own reading, that the decline was not absorption, is both the most likely and the least flattering to a brokerage, which is a reason to take it seriously, but it is still an assertion about data nobody else can see.

The implication is not in dispute. A listing that expires or is withdrawn has not been absorbed. It is shadow supply, held by an owner who still intends to sell, and it returns when conditions look better. Counting it out makes the reported number smaller without making the market tighter.

How many homes are actually for sale

The numerator of months of supply looks like a fact and is not. Four counts of San Miguel listings are in circulation and they differ by a factor of six.

The last row is the awkward one. A directory maintained by the firm that reported 860 active listings in May and 745 in June carries 595 across its colonia pages, 150 short of its own most recent citywide count. It may be listings with no colonia assignment, or land counted differently, or a page on a different update schedule. No source addresses it.

Behind all four counts sits a disclosure the firm makes in passing and no competitor foregrounds: AMPI San Miguel has been navigating an MLS system transition, and not all agencies participate in the same system. Every published listing count for this city is therefore a partial count of unknown coverage, and so is every closing count. Numerator and denominator come from the same partial view.

Inventory by price band: the number that would matter most

The March 2026 update makes the strongest claim in the record, that in several price ranges months of inventory are as high as they have been since the period following the 2008 financial crisis, and attaches no numbers to it. No band-level inventory figure exists anywhere in the public record for this city.

The absence is not a detail. Citywide months of supply averages across a market spanning building lots and multi-million-dollar haciendas, and those segments do not behave alike. A citywide 29.6 could be a uniformly slow market or a normal middle market carrying a badly clogged top. Those are different situations for a buyer and the published data cannot tell them apart.

One adjacent fact is suggestive. Sales above $2 million fell from 19 in 2024 to 12 in 2025, roughly one a month across the entire municipality. Absorption at the top is therefore known and very thin. The count of active listings above $2 million is not published, so months of supply for the luxury band cannot be computed by anyone outside the firm, however informative it would obviously be.

The only supply breakdown that exists at all is geographic, and it is one brokerage’s listing book rather than a market census.

Retrieved 23 July 2026, a snapshot rather than a series, and it mixes houses, condominiums and land. Read for shape rather than level, it says Centro alone carries 220 listings, more than a third of the directory and about a quarter of the citywide count reported for May, while Guadiana, Ojo de Agua and Atascadero each carry about a dozen. A colonia with a dozen listings has no comparable set worth the name, and months of supply cannot meaningfully be computed for it in either direction.

Why 29.6 months is not the emergency the number looks like

Transplant this reading into a mortgage-financed suburb and it would describe a market in serious trouble. Here it describes a market that has slowed. The difference is structural, and no page currently ranking for this query explains it. We are not going to quote an American balanced-market benchmark for comparison either: our sources carry no current United States months-of-supply figure, and the comparison would be invalid even with one, for four reasons.

Almost nobody here has a mortgage. The only firm reporting closed sales describes San Miguel as almost exclusively a cash market, and that is its stated reason for treating 12 to 18 months as typical. No source quantifies the cash share; Mexican mortgage rates for foreign borrowers, put at 10 to 14.5 percent by one aggregator, explain why financing is rare. A market without leverage has no forced sellers, because no lender is waiting.

The carrying cost of waiting is very low. Predial runs on marginal rates of 0.234 to 0.354 percent for urban built property, applied to fiscal value rather than market value. The ratio of fiscal to market value here is published nowhere, so the effective rate cannot be stated, but it sits below the statutory one. An owner who does not sell this year pays very little for the privilege.

Most of this stock is a second home. An unsold second home is still used, lent or let. The urgency that makes a family cut the price on a house they have already moved out of does not apply to most sellers here.

The denominator is tiny. This market closed 404 homes in the whole of 2024 and is running at 31 to 39 a month on the 2026 figures. At that pace a swing of a few dozen listings moves months of supply by more than a month, which is another reason to read 29.6 as a direction rather than a level.

One point cuts the other way. Supply here cannot easily grow through construction: the historic monuments zone covers 0.75 square kilometres across 68 manzanas and any work inside it requires prior application to INAH under a 1982 federal decree, and CONAGUA assessed the aquifer beneath the municipality with a deficit of 61,984,190 cubic metres a year and no volume available for new concessions. This build is not a developer overhang of the kind that has damaged some coastal markets. It is existing stock coming to market and not clearing, though no count of units under construction is published, so the split between resale and new supply inside the 745 is unknown.

Elevated inventory here buys time and negotiating room rather than distress. It does not produce forced sales, and it will not produce them at 30 months or at 40.

Is this a buyer’s market

The firm publishing the data concedes that inventory sits at levels not seen since the period following the 2008 financial crisis, then adds that it still does not feel like a true buyer’s market. That is an assertion from a party that earns a commission on transactions, and the data underneath it points the other way.

What the data supports is narrower than either framing. Supply is roughly double the range the same source calls normal. The transaction count is either flat or down 15 percent depending on which of two consecutive posts is correct. Average closed prices fell 12.6 percent in 2025, which is a change in the mix of what sold at least as much as a change in what homes are worth. Asking prices over the same period, per one aggregator, rose about 9.5 percent in nominal pesos. Rising asks against falling closes is what produces 29.6 months.

What the data does not support is any figure for the discount now available. The sale-to-list ratio of 92 to 97 percent in circulation is inferred, and the publisher carrying it states plainly that Mexico has no published sale-to-list database. The roughly 150-day marketing time in circulation cites a brokerage update containing no days-on-market data at all. A percentage a buyer can expect to negotiate off asking here in 2026 is an estimate no dataset produced.

Leverage is most likely to be real where absorption is thinnest: the band above $2 million, which cleared twelve sales in the whole of 2025, and listings old enough that the seller has already revised expectations. Neither can be identified from public data, which is why an agent’s account of how long a property has been for sale is worth verifying rather than accepting.

What would settle this

A monthly active-listing count published as a series with a stated definition. A months-of-supply figure with its inputs shown. An inventory breakdown by price band, which the same firm has already said is the most interesting cut of the data. A monthly count of listings that closed, expired or were withdrawn. A days-on-market series from MLS records. A statement of what share of local agencies participate in the MLS being reported from. Any of it from a body that earns no commission when a property changes hands.

None of it exists. What exists is roughly 550 words a month from one brokerage, published against its own interest, which is more than anyone else in this market offers and considerably less than the question deserves.

Figures are as published on the dates given, and where a calculation is ours rather than a source’s the page says so. This is published research, not legal or tax advice; your notario is the legal authority on your transaction, and we have no financial interest in whether it closes.