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.
On our first trip to Costa Rica, while driving around the different beaches in the Guanacaste area, we stumbled on an Open House sign for a development near Playa Flamingo. We saw multiple lots, where we could develop a property, and we also saw an already built spec home we could have immediately.
It was 1,950 square feet, with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. It had a garage and infinity pool, with a view of the ocean in the distance. It was listed at $399,000.
We ended up passing on the home, and here’s what factored into that decision.
We bought our first multi-family property – a duplex in the trendy Riverside area of Jacksonville, Florida – and broke three investment rules in the process. We did our due diligence (e,g, property inspection, cash flow calculations) and felt that the opportunity matched our philosophy of cash flow and value over the long-term. But to get the deal done, we did have to relax some of our investment rules that [...]
We first visited Costa Rica in March 2017 and closed on two properties before the end of the year. For our first property, we knew we wanted to be in Tamarindo, a popular beach town. Our intent was to buy a vacation rental investment for now, and “popular” ensures strong rental potential and “beach town” fits in with our priority to retire by the water.
Buying in Costa Rica was important to us because we look at it as our FIRE Plan B – if we can’t afford to retire early in pricey New York City, we could definitely do it here.
After our second child arrived in 2001, our New York City apartment felt smaller and smaller.
We always had a strong interest in buying real estate, but never pulled the trigger. A big regret was not buying a top floor duplex apartment in a small building in the Kips Bay section of Manhattan in the mid 90’s. In our defense, we were less than 2 years out of college and it would have been a financial stretch to do so.
But before long, that several-hundred-thousand-dollar apartment would be worth more than a million. What an investment that would have been!
