Most of Panama City is finished. Santa María isn't.

Santa María is a gated golf community on the edge of Panama City: one guarded entrance, the city's only Nicklaus-designed golf course, a country club, a hotel, and about ten minutes to the airport. Thirty-six apartment towers are finished in Santa María, with roughly 1,800 apartments between them. But the community as a whole is still unfinished. The last towers are still being delivered, and more than ten more are under construction or in pre-sale behind them.

That one fact shapes every price you will see here. In 2025 the community registered 285 apartment sales. 195 of them were the developer selling a new unit for the first time. Just 90 were resales, one private owner selling to a private buyer. Two of every three deeds signed last year had the developer on the selling side.

A finished neighborhood does not look like this. A neighborhood still under construction does. And that changes three things for you: who sets the price, who is under pressure to sell, and how much room you really have to negotiate.

It would be easy to read 2025's record 285 sales as a neighborhood heating up. For a resale buyer, the registry says the opposite. Owner-to-owner sales ran 90 in 2022, 124 in 2023, 134 in 2024, then 90 in 2025: a peak, then a drop of about a third. Resales fell in the same year the total set a record.

The developer set that record. Developer sales jumped from 123 in 2024 to 195 in 2025, and most of that jump came from two towers, The Ivy and Village Center, selling off their remaining units. When a tower is handed over, dozens of deeds land in the registry within a few months. That looks like a rush of buyers. It is really one building being delivered.

For a buyer, this distinction matters more than anything else in this essay. The 285 headline is mostly the developer's number. The market you actually compete in, as a resale buyer today or a resale seller later, is the 90.

When most sales are the developer's, most buyers are negotiating with a company, and that is a different negotiation from bargaining with an owner. A developer has a published price list, dozens of near-identical units behind the one you want, and no attachment to any of them. It is in no hurry to sell your unit this month, and it has no feelings about the view. It will hold its price on your unit, because a discount on one apartment lowers the value of every unsold apartment in the tower.

So the developer rarely gives ground on the sticker price. What you can negotiate is the extras: a finish upgrade, a parking space, a longer payment schedule, or closing costs paid by the seller. Ask for those. If you want a real discount on the price itself, you will find it in the resale market, where you are negotiating with an owner instead of a price list. Just know that market is thin, and getting thinner.

About 90 owner-to-owner resales closed last year, spread across 36 towers. That works out to a handful of resales per tower in a year, and none at all in some towers. That is fine while you are buying new from the developer, who has units to spare. It stops being fine the day you become the seller.

When you resell, you inherit that thin market. You will have no sales office and no price list behind you. You will be one owner looking for one buyer, in a tower where only two or three apartments change hands in a year. That means a long wait when you sell. Price it in on the day you buy; the day you list is too late.

Registered sales run behind the actual deal. A deed reaches the public registry weeks to months after buyer and seller agree. So the most recent months always look a little quieter than they were, until the paperwork catches up.

Developer versus owner-to-owner is our classification; the registry has no such field. We separate the two from the pattern of each sale: a developer selling new units leaves a different trace in the record from one owner selling to another. The classification is careful, but a handful of edge cases could fall on either side of the line.

A run of deliveries is not a hot market. The 2025 jump came from towers being handed over. Reading it as buyer demand would be a mistake. Sales that come from the developer finishing a building tell you the community is filling in. They say nothing about whether prices are climbing.

And the pipeline could change the pace. More than ten towers are still to come. If they deliver on schedule, the developer column stays full for years. If they slow down, the balance tips back toward the resale market sooner than the last four years suggest. This is a snapshot of a community halfway through construction. It is not a forecast of when construction ends.

The 285-sale headline is the developer's number. The market a buyer actually competes in, one owner selling to another, is small, and it got smaller last year while the towers kept going up.

So the first question to ask in Santa María is <em>who is selling?</em>, before <em>what is the asking price?</em> If the seller is the developer, you are negotiating with a price list: push for extras rather than a lower sticker price. If the seller is an owner, you are in the thin part of the market, and that same thin market will be waiting for you on the day you sell.