Everything here is for sale. One tower actually sells.

Santa María sits behind one guarded entrance, with 36 completed apartment towers and roughly 1,800 apartments. The unusual thing about it is who does the selling. In 2025 the community registered 285 apartment sales. 195 of them were new apartments sold by a developer. Only 90 were owners selling to other owners. So two of every three sales never involved a resale at all.

That split explains everything else in this piece. When most buyers buy new, few resales happen. New supply keeps arriving: ten-plus towers are under construction or in pre-sale right now. A buyer who can get a brand-new apartment next door has little reason to choose a resale, unless the resale is clearly cheaper. So resale listings wait.

And they pile up. At any moment the portals show about 552 listings across the community. Many are the same apartment posted by several agents. Counted once each, they come to about 235 different apartments. So 57% of what you see while browsing is a repeat. Even after removing repeats, those apartments compete for roughly 90 owner-to-owner resales in a typical year. set the apartments listed against by the resales per year and most towers come out at several years of listings. Resales have run at a steady pace (90, 124, 134, 90 closings from 2022 through 2025) and that pace cannot absorb what is listed.

There is no crisis behind these figures. A market where the developer sells most apartments looks exactly like this from the resale side: long lists and slow sales.

Start with supply. The community is still being built. Ten-plus towers are under construction or selling off-plan, several of them large. Every new tower adds brand-new apartments that a resale seller has to compete with. A new apartment comes with a warranty and a sales office, and it usually wins on everything except price.

Then add asking prices. The developer sets the reference price for the community, so resale owners tend to ask what the newest tower is asking rather than what the last owner-to-owner sale actually closed at. Across the community, the median asking price is $850,000 and a typical resale closes near $610,000. That is a 39% gap between the two headline prices. Most of that gap is size: the median listed apartment measures 252 m² and the median apartment that actually sells measures 215 m². Per square meter the gap is much smaller: sellers ask about $3,209 and buyers pay about $2,993, a 7.2% difference. In Santa María an overpriced apartment is rarely rejected. It simply stays on the market.

Now look at renting instead of selling. Gross yield means a year's rent divided by the purchase price, before any costs. Inside these gates, price is a poor guide to yield. A cheap apartment does not reliably earn more, and an expensive one does not reliably earn less.

In the five towers where we can measure both rent and sale price per square meter, gross yield runs from 5.3% to 7.9%. The order has little to do with price. Green View has the cheapest square meter in the group, at $2,542, and sits near the bottom at 5.9%. Ocean House has the most expensive, at $3,598, and still earns 7.3%. The clearest result is at the top of the price range: La Maison earns 5.3%, the lowest of any tower we can measure. Buyers pay extra for its brand; tenants do not. Every other row rests on a handful of sales, so trust the range more than the exact order.

A tenant pays for space, location and condition. A tenant will not pay extra for the marble in the lobby or the name over the door. So the part of a price that buys prestige earns no rent, and that part is different in every tower. That is why the table is worth reading row by row.

Choose a tower where apartments both rent and resell. The safest rental purchase in Santa María is in a tower with real tenants and real resales, and only Ocean House has both. It rents at $24.24/m² a month for a 7.3% gross yield, and it is the one big tower where you could also sell within about a year. Village Center earns a little more, 7.9% gross, but its listed apartments would take about 36 months to sell at the current pace. You would be buying the income without an easy way out. Before you buy, price how long you might wait to sell, as well as the rent.

Be careful at both ends of the table. The top row is no guarantee. Village Center's 7.9% rests on a small number of sales, and so does La Vista on the Green's 7.6%. At the other end, the most expensive tower earns the least. La Maison sells near $3,320/m² and yields 5.3%. If you are buying for rental income, La Maison is the one tower where the numbers work against you.

And remember that gross is not what you keep. Santa María carries a country-club membership and building fees that a similar tower outside Santa María does not. Those come out of every figure in the table before you see a dollar. A 7.3% gross yield here is less than a 7.3% return in your pocket. Get the actual fees for the specific tower before you decide.

The count of apartments for sale is a minimum. The same apartment is often listed by several agents at once. The 552 listings across the community come down to about 235 different apartments, so 57% of what you see while browsing is a repeat. We merge those repeats into one, and merging can only lower the count, so the true number of apartments for sale is at or above the figure shown. That makes the months to sell a cautious reading. Counting every raw listing would make the wait look longer, never shorter.

The towers delivered last year show decades, and that is only the math. A tower that handed over its keys in 2025 has almost no owner-to-owner resales to set its listings against, so its months-to-sell figure balloons. The Ivy's 516 says almost nobody has had a reason to resell yet. It says nothing about owners in trouble. The two towers with listings and zero resales in twelve months are the same story one step earlier: their resale market has simply not started. Read those rows as "rarely resold so far," and give them a year before you trust the figure.

The yields are gross, the rents are asking rents, and the samples are small. Asking rents run higher than the rents tenants actually sign. Club and building fees come out before you keep anything. Every row in the yield table rests on a handful of sales. So every yield in this piece is the best case, and your real return will be lower.

Months to sell measures today's pace. It does not predict prices. The figure reflects today's listings against the past year's resales. A resale reaches the registry weeks after the deal is agreed, and a tower's pace can change faster than its reputation. A short figure built on two listings, as at The Privilege, comes from a tiny sample and does not make the tower easy to sell in. This piece measures how long apartments take to sell today. It says nothing about where prices go next.

In Santa María, how long you wait depends on the tower. If you might sell one day, the tower you buy decides whether that wait is about a year or several years, and only one big tower makes it a year. If you are buying to rent out, the yield depends on the tower and does not follow the price. And every gross yield looks better than what you will keep once the club and building fees are paid.

The thing to take from this piece is a question rather than a price: <em>how long would this exact tower take to sell the apartment I am about to buy?</em> Behind these gates the answer ranges from about a year to several years, and it rarely matches the address's reputation.