Costa Rica Blog

Okay I admit it, I'm really busy these days.  I leave tomorrow for Costa Rica to lead our 4 day Discovery tour running December 31 - January 3rd which is immediately followed by our 10 day country and property tour running January 4th - 13th.  In the meantime, International Living did another article about our developments so I've also had to answer hundreds of emails.  I am not complaining.  So here, for the last entry into our blog for 2009, is our UPDATED slide show.  We've worked over the last week to get it finished since our new video is not yet done.  Take a moment to view the show, I think you will enjoy it.  When you are finished, please comment about it via Digg, Delicious or Twitter.  We thank you all for your loyal support this year and hope 2010 is a great one for all of you.

When we'd settled on Costa Rica the destination we planned to retire to the first thing we did was set a strategy to find a piece of property that met our requirements in terms of size, location and budget.  We were pretty savvy shoppers having bought and sold close to a dozen properties in the states so we thought we knew what we were doing.  We first looked for foreclosed property in Costa Rica.  We quickly realized there wasn't much in the way of foreclosed homes in Costa Rica since most homes have no mortgage, with most being purchased in the past for cash.  The mortgage market in Costa Rica is still in it's infancy.  Typically you can't get a mortgage on land, only developer financing.  In this type of financing, the developer holds the note.  Mortgages for finished homes or construction mortgages typically require large down payments in Costa Rica.  Banks in Costa Rica want a minimum of 20% of the value of the mortgage as collateral.  Fortunately you can typically pledge land you own as collateral for a construction loan which is what many owners in our developments end up doing.