Caribbean Developments

In May 2025 a St. Kitts government press release named Blackstone as a counterparty. Safe Harbor Marinas — the 138-marina platform Blackstone Infrastructure had just acquired for US$5.65 billion, closing on 30 April 2025 — bought the marina at Christophe Harbour outright, with plans to expand it for superyachts up to 350 feet. For most of the past two decades, development in the Eastern Caribbean was funded from three places: family developers with generational patience, regional banks willing to carry debt for years rather than force a sale, and citizenship-program money recycled through real-estate thresholds. An infrastructure fund of that size was not one of them.

What changed is the asset type doing the attracting. A marina produces recurring, largely dollar-denominated revenue — berthing, fuel, storage, superyacht servicing — that reads to an infrastructure investor more like a toll road than a beach house. Once one category of Caribbean hard asset became underwritable at institutional scale, the rest of the board moved with it.

Savills counted roughly 910 branded residential schemes operating worldwide at the end of 2025 — up 19% in a single year from 764, and close to triple the 323 that existed in 2015 — and names the Caribbean a leading cluster in the Americas. That is one of the fastest-growing categories in global real estate. At the top of the Caribbean market, unbranded is now the exception.

The reason is practical rather than aspirational. A brand solves three problems specific to owning here: management at a distance, when salt, storms and vegetation work on a house for the forty-eight weeks a year the owner is somewhere else; trust in a market with thin comparable-sales data and a real history of unfinished projects; and a resale pool that is defined and recognisable rather than whoever happens to be looking at that stretch of beach.

The cost is a premium at purchase, ongoing fees, and rules about when you may use your own property. Savills puts that premium at roughly 33% over comparable unbranded stock worldwide, rising to about 39% at resort locations — the category nearly every Caribbean branded scheme sits in. It is defensible for an owner who is genuinely absent ten or eleven months a year. It is much harder to defend for someone who will be there half the year and run the place themselves, and Dan says so. The trade-off is set out on branded residences and graded property by property in an honest ranking of six of them.

The projects below are the ones with disclosed or developer-stated figures attached. Read the wording carefully: only the Blackstone number is an audited, arm’s-length price. The rest are what the developer has said, which is useful as direction and useless as a valuation.

One pattern there matters more than the totals. Three of the projects above are in Turks & Caicos, which runs no citizenship program at all. If this capital were chasing passport demand it would cluster in the five program islands, and it does not. It is underwriting tourism demand, superyacht traffic and hard-asset fundamentals that exist with or without citizenship by investment — the full deal board, dated and sourced, is in the institutional wave.

Caribbean values track flight access more tightly than almost anything else, because access sets the size of the buyer pool, the depth of the rental market and how often an owner actually turns up. Barbuda’s jet-capable airport opened in 2024, three years after the Privy Council ruling that made the land buyable, and the buyers followed in that order. Nevis broke ground on 1 July 2026 on an eighteen-month runway extension, from roughly 4,000 feet toward a reported 5,500 to 6,000, with an apron sized for up to fifty executive jets. Dominica’s international airport, with a runway sized for widebodies, is targeted for 2027. Barbados carried a record 2.4 million passengers in 2025 across roughly 36 nonstop destinations. American is adding a second daily Miami nonstop to St. Kitts for winter 2026–27.

Each of those is more consequential to its market than any individual development on it. An announced airport is not a finished one, and Dan plans around the longer end of any published timeline — but this is where the region reprices, and it is why the practice weights airlift ahead of almost every other input. The wider picture is mapped in the future of luxury Caribbean real estate.

Three effects, and only one is unambiguously good for an owner. New capital arrives as inventory, and inventory is competition: 380 units at Canelles, two full resorts on forty acres in Providenciales, 101 more suites at Beaches. Each is a room competing for your guest and, eventually, a unit competing with your resale listing — landing in concentrated bursts on small islands rather than drifting into a large market.

The competition also gets better, not just bigger. IHG, Six Senses, AMResorts and the Sandals family bring revenue management, global loyalty distribution and marketing budgets an individually owned condominium will never have. A stronger destination lifts everyone’s occupancy; it also closes the era when a well-placed private rental could quietly out-earn the resort down the road. Anyone quoting a yield percentage on a project that has not been built is reading a developer’s pro forma.

The genuine upside is the infrastructure. A marina rebuilt for 350-foot yachts, a longer runway, a branded hotel that fills seats on the route you fly — that is durable value accruing to every owner nearby, including the ones who paid nothing for it. In this region that is where institutional money has actually moved prices: not by bidding up villas, but by lifting the ceiling that was capping the whole market.

One further change sits underneath the list above. In March 2024 four of the five program governments signed a Memorandum of Agreement setting a US$200,000 floor under every citizenship-by-investment option, with St. Lucia joining that June and the floor effective from 1 July 2024. It ended a discounting war and repriced the entry point of every approved development in the region. Where a project on this page is approved, that changes both what it costs and who the eventual resale buyer has to be — the mechanics are on CBI-approved real estate.

Dan Merriam & Associates keeps five offices — Four Seasons Nevis, Marriott St. Kitts, Jolly Harbour in Antigua, Castries in St. Lucia and Portsmouth in Dominica — which is how the team walks a site before a client flies. Pricelists, floorplans, current availability and the underwriting behind each project are shared privately — start with a short call, or see the individual units on current listings.