Havana real estate market

If you want to get a sense of Cuba’s real estate market, you can read this great roundup by Reuters or you can do what I did one day last month, which was to go stand in the Paseo del Prado on a Saturday morning and experience the market first-hand.

There, Cubans used to congregate to arrange permutas, the swaps that were the only legal option before residential real estate sales were legalized.

Now things are busier than before and with no effort at all you meet buyers and sellers, learn about their prices, their strategies, and the market forces behind the reacomodo in the housing market that the government predicted would occur.  There are even brokers who charge sellers a few percentage points of the sale price when they find a buyer.