An image says more than a thousand words. If you look at a simple graph with the trajectory of house prices and wages in Mexico, you can understand why it is increasingly difficult for Mexicans to buy a home.
The pandemic was no help. In 2020, the initial year of the COVID-19 emergency, employees who did not lose their jobs received 10.3% less income than they had before, according to the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy.
With the reopening of economic activities, employment has been recovering in the country, but with lower wages. On the contrary, housing became more expensive 23% between 2018 and 2021, when it reached an average price of 1 million 372,000 pesos.
Taking the national average salary of 2020, a Mexican worker would have to allocate 4 full years of his intact salary to acquire his house. Extrapolating data, this means one more year of work than in 2018, when the gap between both factors was shorter and the home was worth 23% less.
Even more, if Mexicans had the same real salary as in 2005, it would take only 3.72 years to buy a house at the price of 2021. That is, the workers of that time had more possibilities than the new generations to become independent.
This would explain why, on average, Mexicans move out of their parents’ house until they are 28 years old. In Mexico City, where housing costs and median rents are higher, this age rises to beyond 30, according to a 2018 survey by Dada Room.