How Well Does Mexico Know Its Own Properties?

According to SiiLA data, nearly 8,500 Class B or higher industrial properties, office buildings, and shopping centers exist across major markets in northern, central, and Bajío Mexico. Each exists physically at a specific point in the territory, but also within different layers of information: it has an owner, a size, a value, a permitted use, coordinates, licenses and a relationship with its city’s planning framework.

The problem is that those layers do not necessarily communicate with one another. The gap between legal and physical information for the same property illustrates the issue. In 2022, the share of properties linked between Public Property Registries and cadastral records varied widely: Yucatán reached 100%, while Jalisco, Sonora, Hidalgo, Puebla, and San Luis Potosí were below 5%¹.

For the real estate market, that fragmentation has consequences that go beyond paperwork. Information on ownership, physical characteristics, value, permitted uses and regulations is part of the decision-making process when buying, financing, valuing or developing a property. When those layers are separate, so is some of the information needed to make those decisions.

Mexico has spent years trying to close that gap. In 2025 alone, Sedatu allocated 88 million pesos to state and municipal cadastral digitization projects through the Public Property Registry and Cadastre Modernization Program. By February 2026, the agency reported progress on 25 projects, 10 of which were already complete. The process, however, continues. As recently as August 2026, Sedatu said it was working with the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency to harmonize regulatory frameworks that would facilitate information sharing among institutions, a sign that property registry and cadastral interoperability remains a work in progress.

The goal is not simply to turn paper records into digital files, but to connect information that may currently be scattered. The fundamental change is that the property itself can become the point where data produced separately by different institutions comes together.

In commercial real estate, that means something tangible: due diligence. Before buying, financing, or developing an asset, part of the work involves reconstructing and cross-checking property information from different sources. Interoperability does not replace that review or eliminate risk, but it can reduce the time and effort required to understand what is being evaluated before committing capital.

But the value does not end with verifying an asset. When information can be connected at the territorial level, it also changes the questions that can be asked about where to invest. For an industrial developer, for example, it is not enough to know where land exists. What matters is identifying which land simultaneously meets the legal and urban planning requirements to become inventory effectively.

The same logic changes depending on the asset type. In offices, it can help provide a better understanding of the existing building stock; in retail, it can help connect the characteristics of a location with what can be developed there. But in every case, the same condition emerges: before a property can be evaluated as an investment opportunity, it must be possible to understand it as such. Information infrastructure is, in that sense, part of the real estate market’s own infrastructure.

That introduces another dimension for measuring real estate market maturity, since two markets with similar physical inventories can offer different conditions for evaluating an investment if it is easier in one to understand what exists and connect the information that describes it. Seen this way, interoperability does not by itself increase inventory or create demand, but it can expand the portion of the market that is legible to those making decisions about it. Because capital does not just need opportunities; it needs to be able to identify them, compare them and understand their risks.

Want to explore the data behind nearly 8,500 commercial properties across Mexico’s major markets? Visit SiiLA Market Analytics or contact us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

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¹ Secretary of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development (Sedatu), 2022 Results Report of the Comprehensive System for Registry and Cadastral Information Management (SIGIRC), May 2023, p. 8.