December 19, 2009 - In part 2 of Buying Real Estate in Costa Rica at half price, we take a more detailed look at the ramifications of buying property in Costa Rica at Costa Rican prices. Not everything is as it seems and there are a myriad of ways to accomplish your goals in Costa Rica.
BUT… what of the title to this article? Is there really anything to it?
Well, first of all, let me say that our experiences with building, trying to find a home and all of its frustrations lead my wife and I to put up a website which would help people avoid the same type of frustrations we encountered. And we discovered, during our construction period that the biggest problem that Costa Rica has is its lack of transparency and the simple fact that there are really NO RULES AND REGULATIONS CONCERNING REAL ESTATE.
Well, a few maybe, but for the most part, the field is wide open. Can you imagine having a real estate transaction taking place where you had no real idea what the REAL sales price of a home is? There are virtually no disclosure laws whatsoever and it truly is the “wild, wild West.”
Our initial goals were to ensure that buyers knew about the system here, how it worked and to ensure that each buyer knew the “good, bad, and ugly about life here in Costa Rica AND about the real estate system BEFORE buying.”
Now… this isn’t to say that there aren’t honest realtors and developers… there are. A lot of them. The problem is… how to tell the good from the bad… without a scorecard.
Pretty idealistic, huh?
I had no idea.
Think about it… I was criticizing an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars and realtors and developers who were used to salaries averaging easily into six figures yearly. These were people who used the system to their benefit and were sometimes making profits of $50 to $100,000 on ONE house. And people were flocking to Costa Rica and buying up virtually anything in a development with an ocean view or on a beach… without having any idea whatsoever what was a “fair price” or a “reasonable profit”. Remember, there is no MLS… no system of comparables and certainly no disclosure of what “markups” really were AND no transparency whatsoever. And those are just the realtors… developers had their own rules and playbooks.
See what is developing here? I… a naive expat from Minnesota, coming in a trying to tell everyone on the outside what is wrong with the system here. Do you think I was well received?
I obviously hadn‟t thought out the ramifications of what I was doing. But in the beginning we were inundated… we were written up in Business Week, Investors Business Daily , not to mention several local papers and books. And the people began to visit our website in droves.
That was the upside.
The downside was that we were having an effect on the markets here… and others with a foothold here were hearing about us whether they wanted to or not. And that is when the proverbial crap really hit the fan.
Now… remember that Costa Rica is a small country and that one thing that everyone likes to do here is gossip. We got it from all sides. People began criticizing us without even knowing us… they had “heard” that we were dishonest or had taken advantage of “How to buy property in Costa Rica at ‘half price’”… people…and so on.
Postings suddenly were everywhere. Our developments consisted of shoddy workmanship and didn‟t have permitting… we had sold a young couple a lot that couldn‟t be built on… our development (at least one of them) was targeted for closure because we didn‟t have all of our approvals in order… and literally anything that people could come up with. Of course, no one signed their names… it was all innuendo. We were dishonest, crooked… never mind why… just stay away. And when many people were writing into forums asking opinions of us… and they got these types of responses… well, you can guess what the results were. My wife was even uninvited to a Christmas party because another invited guest said she wouldn‟t come if my wife was invited. Yes, that is how bad it got. And in many ways still is.
Why do I continue? Considering that we came here to retire… sometimes I wonder. Stubbornness maybe… stupidity… or maybe I really do believe that people have the right to know exactly what they are getting into.
It would be simple if we could say to everyone “look, just compare OUR prices with THEIRS… and make up your mind.” Pretty cut and dried isn‟t it? Or if we could say… ”just compare our products with the competition… and make up your mind.”
But life doesn‟t always work that way.
Read the third part of How to Buy Real Estate in Costa Rica at half price next week where we finally go into detailed step-by-step instructions on how to Buy Real Estate in Costa Rica at half price!
Read part 1 of Buying Property in Costa Rica at half price
Randy and Rhonda Berg have been living in Costa Rica for over 7 years and have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to buying a home in Costa Rica. You can contact them at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it