COSTA RICA REAL ESTATE – Leadership, Quality, Expertise
Costa Rica has many excellent real estate agents. However, there are two main problems with selling/buying real estate in Costa Rica: 1) there are no definitive regulating agents, law or authorities to oversee the market; and 2) that said, anyone in Costa Rica can buy and sell real estate, which unfortunately allows those with malicious intent to get into the market.
Unless you know the market, the most important thing when buying or selling is to look for an agent or firm with a good track record and experience. Experience comes with knowing Costa Rica and knowing the laws. When buying/selling, you have to do your due diligence to make sure that property is titled correctly; that there are no liens or hidden mortgages; that the owner is in fact the real owner; that the property’s dimensions are correct, etc. For this one has to employ a competent real estate attorney.
Real Estate Costa Rica has good people working with it. For instance, one real estate lawyer it highly recommends is a Canadian who practiced law in Canada for 15 years before coming to Costa Rica, completing law school here, and being admitted to the Costa Rican bar. Many of its associates speak several languages. Its agents are bilingual, and have been selling/buying real estate for years, so they themselves know the market and areas, or can recommend someone whose expertise is in that specific area of the country.
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RICHARD KRUG – After a stint at university (where I finally convinced everyone of what I had known since childhood: I wasn’t cut out for academic life, except for the very, very extra-curricular side) and a 10-year career in the construction industry and as a private home builder in the San Diego area, I settled in Costa Rica 25 years ago. My love of diving and sportfishing initially got me involved in the commercial export of seafood from Costa Rica to the United States. I then set up a sportfishing/tourism desk at the Hotel Del Rey in San José 15 years ago where I found my niche. Over the years the companies I founded, Americana Sportfishing and Fish Costa Rica, have been among Costa Rica’s most successful and best-regarded provider of fishing trips, complete fishing vacations and fishing packages in the country, averaging about a boat in the water per day. A year ago, we also founded Costa Rica Medical Tours.
And the Hotel Del Rey, along with its bar that I designed and decorated on a sportfishing theme – the Blue Marlin Bar – has since become the best-known hotel/bar in Central America. I also wrote the fishing column in the weekly Tico Times, the region’s top English-language newspaper, for six years.
Because I have no pension nor wealthy wife or ‘companion’ to provide for my old age, I figured the best thing would be to enter the real estate market. So I did, first as a broker, and now as an owner and developer. Aside from owning ocean view land in the rapidly growing Playa Hermosa/Jacó area of Costa Rica, I am co-owner and co-developer of the 62-acre Lomas Coronado project on the South Pacific coast. I also own Americana Real Estate marketing company, which over the past five years has successfully marketed and sold real estate throughout Costa Rica.
MARK SYDNEY did his BA (1968) in Canadian History at the University of Toronto, Canada, after which he wrote for, designed and edited a labor publication in the city before being seconded to a division of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, thus instantly becoming an international bureaucrat. There Mark did research; worked on publications and translations; organized conferences, conference documentation and conference translations around the world; had the opportunity to visit 130 countries; and to enjoy extended stays in cities such as Paris, Budapest, Helsinki, Cairo, Bogotá, Moscow and Brussels. He speaks, besides English, of course, French, Spanish, Russian and a fair smattering of Italian and German, plus some street Arabic, Hungarian and Finnish not acceptable in ‘proper’ society.
Retreating to Canada, Mark Sydney returned to work on a labor newspaper and was then hired by the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa for its press and publications department, where he came immediately under fire – and survived relatively unscathed – handling his first major assignment: the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. When that position died with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he migrated (1992) to Costa Rica where he has resided ever since. From the snobbish heights of having owned an art gallery in San José, Mark has since descended to successfully puttering about (for the past dozen years or so) in the general travel, sportfishing and real estate businesses first with Costa Rica’s Travel Web and now as an Associate (read ‘jack-of-all-trades’) of Americana Sportfishing, Fish Costa Rica and Americana Real Estate, where he is currently thriving.
