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.

814

Active MLS listings, August 2026

Realty San Miguel, 9 September 2026. 860 in May, 745 in June, 805 in July. No September count had been published by 5 October 2026.

4 of 9

Months of 2026 with a published listing count

May to August. January to April were never published by anyone, and September had not been by 5 October. Four points are not a series.

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 Realty San Miguel, a brokerage that publishes closed-sale counts from its view of the local MLS, 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 publishes none of its own. Every inventory figure here comes from one brokerage’s view of a partially subscribed MLS, and so does every closing figure except where a second brokerage agent reading the same MLS is named. 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 does months of supply measure?

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. Here they do. Since August 2026 a brokerage agent has published a median time to sell from the AMPI MLS, 178 days from listing to closing for homes sold in the first half of 2026, which is about six months against a pool that would take 29.6 months to clear. The median describes the homes that sold. Months of supply describes everything still waiting, including the listings that will never sell at the price asked.

Corrected 24 September 2026: earlier versions of this page said no days-on-market or sale-to-list series existed for this city and described Realty San Miguel as the only firm reporting closed sales. A closed-sale median has been public since 14 April 2026 (Rafael Mora Real Estate, Q1 2026: $480K), and a brokerage agent has published monthly medians, days to sell and a sale-to-ask ratio from the AMPI MLS since 1 August 2026.

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 that can be checked against the sold record. 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 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 a party with access we do not have, 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

Four of the nine months of 2026 to date have a listing count attached to them.

Four consecutive datapoints, starting at what is so far the year’s high, are not a series either. They establish no seasonal pattern and no prior-year comparison beyond May’s, 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 for sale in San Miguel de Allende?

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 the 745 it had reported for June, its most recent citywide count at the time. 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.

Re-read 5 October 2026: this table can no longer be reproduced. The same directory now lists 253 colonias with counts that sum to 11,200, among them 1,934 for Centro, 876 for San Antonio and 481 for Los Frailes. The firm reported 814 active resale listings for the whole city in August, so whatever the directory now counts, it is not homes currently for sale, and the page does not say what it is. The figures above are the 23 July reading and should be treated as that date’s snapshot only.

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. Realty San Miguel, which reports closed sales from its MLS view, 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 San Miguel de Allende 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 1.6 to 2 times the range the same source calls normal. The firm’s closing count through August ran 12.5 percent behind 2025, 253 against 289, on a series it revised once without explanation; a second brokerage agent’s count of 181 home sales for the first half, from the same MLS, sits near the revised series. 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 supports only weakly is a figure for the discount now available. Two brokerages publish a sale-to-ask ratio and both put it at 96 percent, or about 4 percent off ask: Mike Fanelli for the first half of 2026, from weekly AMPI transaction reports that, in his own words, the sold archive cannot verify, and Live In San Miguel for 298 sales from 7 January to 30 September 2026, from the same weekly presentations. The same report counts 339 price changes in the half, 92 percent of them reductions, so the asking price a sale is measured against may already have been cut. The sale-to-list ratio of 92 to 97 percent in wider circulation is inferred, and the publisher carrying it states plainly that Mexico has no published sale-to-list database. The measured time to sell is a median of 178 days from listing to closing for the homes that sold in the first half of 2026; 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 the price of a listing that is still unsold 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 by price band. 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, and since August 2026 a second brokerage agent’s monthly reading of the same MLS, which adds a median price and a time to sell, and a third firm’s year-to-date report on every closing, first read on 8 October 2026. Together they are considerably less than the question deserves.

Corrected 8 October 2026: earlier versions of this page called 29.6 months the most recent published reading and gave 745 as the firm’s listing count. The newest readings are 30 months and 814 listings, for August (Realty San Miguel, 9 September 2026), and its closing count through August ran 12.5 percent behind 2025. They said short-term rental demand troughs in May, June and September; AirROI’s page for August 2025 to July 2026, updated 12 September 2026, gives May, June and July. And they said one sale-to-ask figure had been published and two brokerages read the MLS in public; Live In San Miguel also publishes, with 96 percent on 298 sales from 7 January to 30 September 2026 (read 8 October 2026).

Updated 5 October 2026. The newest readings are for August: 814 active listings and 30 months of inventory on Realty San Miguel’s single-month method, about 26 on its year-to-date pace by our arithmetic. For September the only supply figure published so far is a flow: 136 new listings in the month against 38 closings, on Mike Fanelli’s reading of the AMPI MLS. New listings are not the stock of homes for sale, so no September months-of-inventory figure can be computed from them, and we have not computed one.

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.