Jamaica

The north coast carries the resorts — Montego Bay, Ocho Rios, Negril — and with them the airports, the villa stock and most foreign purchases. Kingston, on the south side behind the Blue Mountains, is a working capital with apartment buildings, traffic and a business population that has nothing to do with tourism. Between them sits a green, steep, sparsely built interior.

Who buys here

Returning residents and the Jamaican diaspora buy in numbers that most Caribbean markets never see, alongside North American and British purchasers of resort villas. Houses and apartments trade more than in the smaller territories, because there is a local market to trade with.

The trade-offs

Jamaica is directly in the hurricane track and takes storms regularly. Security is a real consideration and varies sharply by neighbourhood — advice that holds for one parish does not hold for the next, and local knowledge beats a map. Infrastructure outside the resort corridors is uneven: water supply, road surface and power reliability all differ from what a visitor experiences on a resort strip. Direct long-haul flights from North America and the UK are frequent, which is a genuine structural advantage.