GEMA Properties keeps houses for owners who are not in them, and property management in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, starts from something true here and nowhere else on our list: an American holds the deed itself. The Ley de Inversión Extranjera defines the Zona Restringida as the strip of national territory of one hundred kilometres along the borders and fifty along the beaches referred to in fraction I of article 27 of the Constitution, and this town is inland, in neither strip, so what is restricted in San Miguel is the building rather than the title: on a house inside the declared monument zone, any kind of work requires the express authorisation of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
One person answerable for the house and for the permit · A monthly statement with gross, deductions and net · No fixed or setup costs · We answer to the owner, never to the guest.
The question every American buyer asks first — can foreigners own property in Mexico — is settled here by a distance rather than by a structure, and the deed that answers it then turns up where an owner does not expect it: among the papers an INAH application has to carry are the legal documents accrediting ownership of the property: a public deed registered in the Public Registry of Property, or a lease with the owner's written authorisation, so the instrument that makes ownership simple here is an exhibit in the file that makes work on the house difficult.
The permit is federal and it is not reserved for monuments: the procedure is titled a works permit for historic monument buildings, their adjoining properties and monument zones, which is how a house that is not itself a monument, but stands inside a declared zone, ends up inside the same file.
It is not purely federal either, because the same file has to carry a current single certificate of land-use zoning issued by the local authority, together with the alignment and the official number: the town hall's paper sits inside the institute's application rather than beside it, and the two queues run in series and not in parallel.
The criterion of resolution reaches past your own walls, and the ficha states it twice — it is obligatory that the works requested by the interested parties do not affect the architectural elements of the building, and obligatory that they do not affect the adjoining property and its surroundings — so on a street where houses share their side walls the building next door is part of the test your own application has to pass.
One procedure can also sit inside another: for an extension, new work, restructuring, re-foundation, sheet-piling or excavation the file additionally needs the approval of INAH's Directorate of Archaeological Salvage, through procedure INAH-05-001, and the answer to the works permit is only issued once that one has been resolved, so an owner counting the days from the morning the papers went in can be counting from the wrong morning.
The perimeter has a date: UNESCO declared the town on 7 July 2008, and the inscription covers a total of 64 blocks that make up the historic centre of the colonial city.
We work in the Centro Histórico, Atascadero, Guadiana and San Antonio, and for any address the first thing established is which side of that perimeter it falls on, because that is what decides whether the year begins at a window or at the equipment.
The street explains the rest of it: streets are narrow, walls rise close to the pedestrian, and then a doorway opens into a private courtyard that feels much larger than the façade promised — one aperture, one width of street, no second way in, and scaffolding, lime and cantera all arriving through that door to be carried, which is why access is priced and scheduled here as a separate thing from the work itself.
| What sets the date | The date, and what it changes for the house |
|---|---|
| INAH response time | 10 days counted from the first day after the application is received, and with no reply within that time the applicant is to consider the application refused — refusal arrives as an absence, so the ten days are a diary entry and not a wait. |
| INAH authorisation | The procedure is free; the authorisation runs for one year and may be extended for an equal period — asked for too early it expires before the scaffolding is up, too late and the work falls into the rains, so it is scheduled backwards from the work and not forwards from the idea. |
| Dry season | November to April, with sunny days and cool nights — six months of it against an authorisation that runs twelve, so a permit granted in May spends half its life in months when nothing outside can be done. |
| Rains | June to September, and the rain usually falls in the afternoon or at night — rain that arrives after noon leaves the morning to the trades, so what shortens in summer is the working day rather than the season. |
| State lodging tax | In Guanajuato the Impuesto por Servicios de Hospedaje is 4 %, filed within the first 22 days of the following month — a monthly deadline that exists whether the house was let for thirty nights or for two, and that the platform may already have settled at source. |
A simplification of those deadlines has already been published and does not yet apply: the reduction of the response times set out in articles 3 and 5 of the Agreement establishing simplification and administrative improvement measures for procedures carried out before the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, published in the D.O.F. of 10 December 2025, will be applicable once the institutional digital platform is in a productive environment, so the response time an owner plans a year against is still the one the ficha publishes today.
A deed instead of a bank trust takes a counterparty out of the ownership of the house but nobody out of its upkeep, because the file names people: it has to carry the document that accredits professional practice: the responsiva of the Director Responsable de la Obra, or the professional licence of the architect responsible for the work — and, where the owner is not the one presenting it, a carta poder authorised by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, or the public instrument that empowers the representative to carry out the procedure.
So an owner in the United States needs two things standing in San Miguel and neither of them is a courier — a licensed professional who will put a name on the drawings, and a representative the institute itself has accepted — which is why remote property management is a plain description of the brief and not a euphemism: the owner is in the United States and the ventanilla is not.
Part of the work is a caretaker's — the house opened, aired, watched, its systems run — and part of it is a vacation rental property manager's, but here a third part is neither and cannot be done from an airport, which is holding the signature the file will ask for on a day nobody can name in advance; owners weighing up property management companies in San Miguel de Allende usually end up asking one thing: who will be standing at that window on day ten, and with which identification, given that to request any procedure at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia you must identify yourself by CURP, passport or INE.
The first thing we need is the address, because it decides whether the house's year opens at a ventanilla or at a boiler; the second is the file, and there the institute leaves a trace an owner can be asked for, since once the application is approved the applicant must present two complete sets of plans of the authorised project, signed in autograph by the owner or his legal representative and by the responsible architect, for the Institute's certification.
A house whose outside was altered lawfully has that certified set in existence somewhere and a house whose outside was altered without it has nothing to hand over, which is the difference between a year that opens with a contractor and a year that opens at a window, and it is what the reading establishes before anything is quoted.
We charge no fixed or setup costs, only a percentage of income, net of expenses, and asking costs nothing.
Filed online, the window checks the documents and, if they are correct and complete, sends an email with the file number assigned and the probable date of the reply; if you receive no notification within two working days you must contact the INAH window of your state. That two-day check is what matters most from abroad, because it is what stops an application sitting unnoticed while the response clock is already running.
Yes, and it is a separate procedure from the works permit: the institute issues an authorisation to place signs, awnings and/or antennas on historic monuments, on buildings adjoining them, or in declared historic monument zones, because articles 42, 43 and 44 of the Federal Law on Monuments and Archaeological, Artistic and Historic Zones, and articles 42, 43 and 44 of its Regulations, establish it. For an owner that means a satellite dish or a terrace awning belongs on the same list as the façade, and not on the list of things a contractor settles on the day.
The institute draws the line by exclusion: minor works are all those not included in the list of major works — the list that carries façade modifications and exterior mechanical installations — so what decides a job is which side of that list it falls on, and not whether the building is famous. If what you need is simply the status of the property, there is a procedure for exactly that: INAH 07-001 Modalidad A, free of charge, a consultation that does not constitute a clearance.
The usual arrival is Querétaro: 74 km by road and about 1 h 22 by car, or around 3 h 10 by bus with a change. That is a road transfer and not a local hop, so an arrival that needs to find the house open, aired and stocked is planned with the house rather than with the flight — which is what turns a landing time into an errand with a date on it.
Far more than a form. The official ficha asks for a complete set of plans of the current state of the monument, a complete set of architectural plans of the intervention project — plans, sections and elevations — with the specifications of materials and finishes, and a colour photographic sequence of the whole street on which the building stands and of the places where the work will be carried out. That last item is the one that settles who prepares the file: a photographic sequence of an entire street is a morning spent on it, not an attachment found in a drawer.
The water. San Miguel's water is hard, full of scale and not safe to drink from the tap, and what is installed against it is whole-house filtration, softeners and drinking-water systems. The setting explains the mildness that hides it: the town sits at more than 1,900 metres above sea level, with an annual average temperature between 16 °C and 22 °C. Wear here accumulates inside the installations instead of announcing itself on the outside of the house.
Tell us the address, how much of the year the house stands empty, and whether anything outside it has been changed since you bought it. You will receive the answer in writing.