Real Estate

I had been reading business and personal finance books and news since college, but didn’t focus on real estate topics. Once we realized real estate could be the linchpin of our FIRE journey, I did start reading more real estate news and resources. Here are my favorites.

With two properties and over 20% of our net worth invested in Costa Rican real estate, our actions and wallet have clearly answered Yes to the question, “Is real estate in Costa Rica a good investment.” I’m not a financial advisor so I would never give another person specific investment advice anyway, and just because real estate in Costa Rica works for us doesn’t mean it will work for you. [...]

We recently ran into a string of air conditioning issues with one of our rental properties in Jacksonville, to the tune of $10,000. Read on for details, but this is a good example of buyer beware and that old mechanical systems will fail sooner than later. Did you know there is "$5,000 Rule" for determining when to repair or replace your air conditioner?

We made our second investment in Costa Rica for a variety of reasons. Casa Salita is a 4-bed, 4-bath house with a separate casita, private pool, wraparound deck (with two hammocks!) and an outdoor kitchen. It sleeps 10, so the capacity of it certainly increases its rental prospects. However, it also has unique properties that add income potential and versatility to what we can do with the property: The property [...]

We closed on our first property, Condo Boom, in October 2017 and then on our second property, Casa Salita, just under two months later. Why two investments so close together? Having expanded our real estate portfolio from two rentals in our first eight years of investing to two or three per year since then, we’ve seen the benefit of volume. When you have two properties and one goes vacant, you [...]

Over the years, we've researched and purchased properties on our own, and we've also used turnkey real estate companies to locate, renovate and manage for us. Turnkey properties come with their own benefits, namely cash flow and easy to buy, but they are not completely turn-key.

If you are interested in real estate, but don't know where to start and don't have network of real estate professionals to lean on, don’t worry – we didn’t either when we started.   The most important thing we did to start was to let other people know that we were looking to buy. We didn't really know where we wanted to buy our first property when we started looking in 2001, but since it would be a weekend home, it needed to be reasonably close to New York City.

Before our first trip to Costa Rica in March 2017, we had checked out the Philippines two months earlier. Scott, our oldest daughter and I took a 2-week trip to Manila in January 2017 – their first trip and my fourth, although my previous trip was 25 years ago, so it felt like my first time too. I was already primed to possibly live there because the favorable exchange rate (currently over 50 Philippine pesos to one US dollar) meant that we could drop everything and retire -- no job required -- right now.

In our first trip to Costa Rica, we split our week between Tamarindo (the “Gold Coast”) and Ojochal (the “Southern Zone”). These were two areas we had read about, and we wanted to compare them back-to-back. We opted to start our Costa Rica journey with a small condo in the heart of the Gold Coast, walkable to everything. It suits our needs for a hassle-free, income-producing, and driverless vacation property. Now that we have two Gold Coast properties in our portfolio, maybe we’ll reconsider the Southern Zone. I’m afraid to look at where prices have gone even in just one year.