Drive around, observe, and take notes.

Disclaimer: I am not a CPA nor an expert, but just sharing my observation of your situation.

While there was a marginal uptick towards the end of the summer, it failed to reach the levels observed in previous years, highlighting a sustained scarcity of available properties.

Its just observational math but the math dont lie.  

Presumably, it's a cash business for the most part, i.e. restaurants, and not only do buyers want to see business records, the business broker who represented the buyer had me sit in the business to observe it for two weeks.

Is really more an observation about the whole country not specifically bout investing, Mexico is a very corrupt country and I don`t believe real estate investing is excluded from that corruption.

At least a 10X factor in my observation vs pre-covid/insanity years.

If so, early observations?

However, I have observed several clients over the years blow through 401Ks and inherited funds late in life.

In my observation, the liquidity of REITs leads to significantly more volatility - just look at what happened to REIT values at the beginning of covid.