Full-service management for luxury homes in Mexico
GEMA Properties is a private administration office. We provide luxury property management in Mexico for owners whose house stands empty for most of the year, in Tulum, Cancún, Playa del Carmen, San Miguel de Allende, Los Cabos and Acapulco. One office holds the keys, the vendor list, the maintenance calendar and the accounts, and one statement reaches you each month.
Five of those six towns sit inside the restricted zone, where a foreign owner holds the house through a bank trust permitted by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores; San Miguel de Allende, inland, is the one that is not. That difference changes the paperwork around the house, and none of it changes who has to be there when the pump fails.
We work for owners, not for guests. Nothing on this page is for sale to a traveler, and nothing here promises a return.
What full-service property management covers
Full-service property management means one office is answerable for the building, its systems, its grounds and its paperwork, so there is no second number to call when something fails. At GEMA that scope is standing work: it is performed whether or not the house is earning anything, and it does not pause when you leave.
The standing work is this:
The private estate management services above concern the building, its systems and its grounds. Our luxury home management services cover the house itself, not the guest calendar. If the house also earns — nightly, weekly, or for a season — that is a separate service with a separate calendar, and it is described on vacation rental management. The two run on the same house, and neither one requires the other.
The problem this exists to solve
Absentee owner property management has to answer one question, and it is not a question about marketing: what happens to the house in the eleven months you are not standing in it. That is remote property management on your side of the arrangement, and continuous presence on ours.
Absentee homeowner services are judged in the months when nobody is watching, which in Mexico are also the hardest months of the year. The snowbird property management pattern — arrive in December, leave in April — hands us the house at the exact moment it starts to be tested: on the Caribbean coast the sargassum season runs April to October and the Atlantic hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November, while on the Pacific side the season opens two weeks earlier, on 15 May. Expat property management, in the sense American owners use the term, means somebody here answering for a house you own somewhere else.
Owners comparing luxury property management companies in Mexico tend to start in the same place, and it is rarely a price list. It is a question about accountability at two in the morning, when a pump fails in a house nobody is in.
What the house is actually up against
Choosing a property manager in Mexico is not a rental decision. It is a decision about physics, water and paperwork, and those three change completely between one of our six areas and the next.
Salt. On both coasts, salt air will take the zinc off galvanized hardware in months rather than decades. It is why a coastal air-conditioning unit is maintained on a different schedule from an inland one: filters changed at least once a month instead of once a season, and a professional looking at the unit twice a year, rinsing the salt off the coil at each visit. In a house that sits closed between stays, that same unit is also the dehumidifier that keeps mold out of the bathrooms and the laundry.
Water, in two opposite forms. On the Yucatán peninsula the aquifer is karst: the water carries dissolved calcium and magnesium carbonates, which leave scale on the pool waterline and on every fitting where water evaporates. In Baja California Sur the problem is not the water's hardness but its absence — San José del Cabo is run on a tandeo, the published rotation OOMSAPAS uses to share what there is between neighbourhoods, topped up when a main fails by an emergency programme of water delivered in pipas, with a second desalination plant of 250 litres per second due to come online. A pool and a garden are not the same commitment in those two places.
An empty house is a biological event. Buckets, sunken patios and plant saucers holding still water become an Aedes aegypti breeding site within days, which is precisely what a closed house produces after a week of afternoon rain — and Quintana Roo remains among the states with the highest dengue incidence in the country, so an empty patio there is a public-health matter and not only a nuisance. Termites want the same thing mosquitoes do, which is moisture, so a leak that would be a nuisance in Arizona is an infestation here.
Power, and what power carries with it. On 26 September 2025 a single failure in the south-eastern grid left Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo without electricity at once. In a house that draws from a rooftop tinaco through an electric pump, a power outage becomes a water outage in a matter of hours, and a freezer becomes a problem overnight. On Tulum's beach road the question does not even arise in that form: that stretch was built inside ejido land and has neither sanitary drainage nor a grid connection, so hotels, restaurants and houses along it run on their own generating plants as a normal operating condition rather than as an emergency.
Storms are a calendar, not an event. Beryl came ashore just east of Tulum on 5 July 2024 as a category 2 and left half the town without power; Otis reached Acapulco on 25 October 2023 as a category 5, with sustained winds of 270 km/h. Preparation is done before the season opens, not when a cone appears on a map, and on the two coasts the season opens on two different dates.
Materials have a region. Chukum is a lime plaster bound with the bark resin of Havardia albicans, which sets into a seamless, breathable surface. It is repaired, not repainted, and a contractor who treats it as painted stucco will close the wall and trap the humidity it was chosen to release. It is also endemic to the Yucatán and has no business in Baja California Sur, where the local vocabulary is stone, clay tile and the shade of a palapa or a palo de arco pergola. Knowing which is which is the difference between maintenance and damage.
And paperwork is local, too. In San Miguel de Allende the historic centre is a federally designated Zona de Monumentos Históricos, by a decree published on 28 July 1982, and INAH has to authorize the work — a change to a facade counts as a major work — the same 64 blocks inscribed by UNESCO in 2008. There, a repair is an authorization before it is a job, and the calendar has to hold time for both.
How the work starts
- A private valuation. You describe the house and how you use it, and we answer with what it needs rather than with a package.
- Inspection and inventory. Estate management in Mexico starts with an inventory of what is actually there: systems and their ages, warranties, keys, meters, the CFE and water accounts, the condominium regulation, the fideicomiso or the deed, and the documents that are missing.
- The plan and the calendar. Each recurring task gets a date and an owner, before anything is agreed on. The dates are not the same in the six towns: in Los Cabos the heavy work has to be finished before the Pacific season opens on 15 May, while San Miguel de Allende bends around fixed dates rather than around weather — La Alborada, on the weekend closest to 29 September, Semana Santa, and a Día de Muertos that closed above 98% hotel occupancy in 2023, with more than 110,000 visitors. Where a state lodging tax or the federal Registro Nacional de Turismo applies to the house, it goes on the same calendar rather than being discovered late.
- Vendors and the standing schedule. We select, brief and supervise them, and they answer to us.
- One statement a month. Gross, deductions, net, on the same day of every month, with the detail behind each line: see monthly owner reporting.
How the fee works
Property management fees are one percentage of income, net of expenses, and nothing else. We charge no fixed fees and no setup fee, and this page carries no figures: the percentage belongs on a proposal for one specific house, not on a public page.
What moves it is the house, not the market: size and the number of systems, whether there is a pool, a garden and a rooftop tank, whether the house runs on the public grid and the municipal water main or on its own generator and tanker deliveries, how far it stands from the town and its suppliers, whether it earns or only stands, the condominium regime it belongs to, and the permit environment around it — which in the historic centre of San Miguel de Allende is a different animal from a gated development on the Corridor in Los Cabos. Concierge is not part of the fee at all: it is optional and quoted per use. It is never included, and no one is charged for it who has not asked for it.
Where we manage properties
The service is the same in all six; the work is not. What follows is written on the physical and regulatory reality of each place.
If you are still deciding which service you need, the services overview sets the four side by side.
Do I have to rent the house out to use this service?
No: this is the custody and upkeep of the house, and it runs identically on a home that is never rented. Renting is a separate decision with its own service and its own calendar.
How often does somebody actually enter the house?
On a schedule agreed before the first month, and always with a written record of the visit and photographs of what was found. The frequency is set by the house and by where it stands: a closed house on the Caribbean coast, where humidity sits around 80% and September is the wettest month of the year, is inspected more often than a house in the dry highland air of San Miguel de Allende, and the schedule does not change silently.
How do you charge?
A single percentage of income, net of expenses. There is no fixed fee and no setup fee; the percentage is agreed on your property and stated in the proposal.
The house is held in a fideicomiso. Does that change how it is managed?
No: ownership and upkeep are different questions. In the restricted zone, residential property owned by a foreign national is held through a 50-year renewable bank trust permitted by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, and that concerns ownership, not upkeep. We work with whoever the owner appoints on the legal side; we do not give legal or tax advice, and we do not represent the owner before their bank or notary.
What happens during hurricane season?
The house is prepared before the season opens — 1 June on the Atlantic side, 15 May on the Pacific — with the closing sequence, the documentation and the suppliers agreed in advance. Preparation is calendar-based and not forecast-based for a documented reason: twenty-four hours before it reached category 5 at Acapulco, Otis was still forecast at 70 mph and gained 110 mph in a single day. After a storm we inspect, photograph and report before quoting anything, because a report written to be verified is worth more than a fast estimate.
What do I receive every month?
One statement, on the same day each month: gross income if there is any, deductions line by line, and the net. The figures are set out on the owner reporting page, which also shows what you can check yourself.
Start with a valuation
Tell us about the house — where it is, how it is built, how often you are in it, and what has gone wrong before. We will answer with what the house needs and what it takes to hold it there.