Methodology

Every statistic is computed over the inventory TuLugar continuously monitors in each country: the listings published on the site plus residential inventory we track for statistical purposes only, which never appears in search results. That is why a page's "monitored listings" figure can be much larger than the browsable inventory — and why our medians rest on samples several times larger than what is publicly visible.

The base is cleaned before anything is computed: the same unit listed by several agencies counts once (group deduplication), listings with price or currency error signals are excluded, and each metric applies its own plausibility filters, detailed below. The counts printed next to each figure ("N listings analyzed") are always that figure's actual sample — the evidence behind the number, never the area's total inventory.

The median price per square meter (USD) of apartments for sale. Apartments only, and the reason is units: an apartment's m² is built interior area, while a house's usually includes the lot — for some sources it IS the lot. Mixing them does not produce a "more complete" average; it produces a units error. Houses and land get their own metrics, in their own units.

Filters: active sale listings with valid price and area (20–1,000 m²), a 200–8,000 USD/m² plausibility band (below is almost always a currency error; above is not a Latin American residential apartment), no detected price anomalies, grouped duplicates counted once. The index is published at country, region, city and neighborhood level — always the same definition, with minimum sample floors at every level.

Houses: the median TOTAL price in USD, not $/m² — a house's published m² mixes construction and lot depending on the source, so total price is the only honest unit, and it is also how the Latin American market itself quotes houses. Plausibility band: 10,000 to 5,000,000 USD.

Land: the median price per m² of the plot. For area we take the larger of the published area and the recorded lot size (the known data-entry errors always store values smaller than the truth, so the larger of the two is the best available estimate of the plot), require plots of at least 300 m², and apply a 1–2,500 USD/m² band that discards hectares mistakenly recorded as m².

For regions and cities, the reference rent is the TuLugar Rent Index (next section). For neighborhoods — where samples are too thin to mix-adjust — we publish per-bedroom-cut medians, each with its own minimum sample floor, alongside the per-bedroom breakdown where the sample allows. Monthly rentals only (short-term rentals have their own section with their own methodology), with a plausibility band and anomaly filters.

A raw median over all rentals together moves when the listing mix changes, not when prices change — a month with more 3-bedroom listings "raises" the average without a single rent going up. That is why we do not publish one.

Published on the price maps (regions and cities): a mix-adjusted typical rent in the methodological family of the Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI). It is computed over all monitored residential rentals (apartments and houses, monthly), grouped into six cells by type and bedrooms; each area's value is the weighted sum of its cell medians, with fixed weights reflecting the composition of the country's monitored rental stock. Every area is thus priced as if it had the same housing mix, so differences between areas reflect prices — not composition.

One difference from Zillow we prefer to state rather than hide: Zillow weights to census housing stock; we weight to our monitored stock, the best available proxy in markets without that public statistic. An area publishes its index only when its cells cover at least 60% of the weights with a minimum number of observations; where the sample falls short (most neighborhoods, for example), we publish the per-bedroom medians instead — the same data threshold decides, never a different methodology.

Sample floors: no figure is published with fewer than 5 observations, and aggregate levels require higher floors (a median computed over three listings is not a median). Where the sample falls short, the area shows no figure — we prefer a map with honest gaps to a complete map of weak numbers.

Published months are never restated: once a monthly series value is out, it does not change retroactively. Methodological improvements ship as new series, with their date and definition — never by rewriting history. Downloadable datasets only ever add columns; existing ones keep their meaning forever.

Cadence: page figures are recomputed daily over the nightly snapshot; monthly series freeze on the 1st of each month.

Other methodologies

Not all TuLugar data lives on this page: each data product publishes its methodology where it is used. This is the index.