I spent about 20 minutes today talking to a pretty concerned non-military new arrival to the island about the cost of rent and explaining options to him.

Later when I got back into the office, I saw the December edition of "Casa Guam" magazine, our local real estate publication. Quite honestly, its just full of photos and advertisements of and for real estate agents. They took the liberty last year or so of copying & pasting a fair amount of information from one of my websites, so I don't mind bashing them a bit now and then.

I don't really get much out of the magazine really, but it is good for a little statistical information about the real estate market on Guam, and a blog post now and then.

All the information was pulled directly from the multiple listing service (MLS), so it's available to everyone, but I would suggest the numbers here are a bit off. There are quite a number of real estate transactions that never make it to the MLS. But, this is as good as we got, so let's have a look.

At present, the average price of a condo rental on Guam is $1427 per month. Buying the average condo will cost you $169k. Single family homes are a bit higher at an average of $2113 per month to rent, or $271k to buy it, all according to the statistics. At the time the stats were pulled, there were 1, 942 properties listed on the MLS for sale and/or rent.