We don’t name all of our real estate – only the vacation properties, not the long-term rentals.
All three of our Costa Rican units have names: Condo Boom, Casa Salita and Condo Reeves. From a practical perspective, we figured the names would help with marketing the properties. Having a name would make the property searchable on a vocational rental platform like AirBNB, without divulging the address. The names could also serve as tags on social media.
Costa Rica doesn’t have addresses, so names are even more important here. The location of a property is simply described in relation to its surroundings. For example, the address of Condo Boom is 100 meters north of Villa Verde 1, its neighboring condo complex. Casa Salita’s address is 50 meters east of its neighboring landmark. I’m sure Casa Salita figures into the address of properties near to it.
Giving it a name can upgrade your home
We’re not alone in realizing the branding potential of naming your home. A recent Wall Street Journal piece talks about how naming your home can upgrade the perceived value of the property. The WSJ profiled some creative selections, like Flip Flop Manor:
After watching his favorite home décor shows, Tony Lentini, decided on the name Flip Flop Manor for the four-bedroom Galveston, Texas, rental he bought in 2019 with his wife Carolyn Lentini. He wanted the 107-year-old home a few blocks from the beach to sound approachable yet stately enough to draw wealthier renters.
“A manor is a fancy house and flip flops are pretty down in the sand,” says the 71-year-old investor-relations executive. “Having a cute name attracts people.”
The New York Times also talked up the benefits of naming property. According to David Wilk, director of the real estate program at Temple University Fox School of Business, “the name can be a way of differentiating your property in a crowded market.”
Be careful with names that have more than one meaning – like condo boom
I came up with names for properties, years ago, well before we embarked on building a real estate portfolio or deciding on Costa Rica specifically. I had always dreamed of owning properties around the world and naming them after things that are meaningful to us. For example, my childhood nickname is Bots, and Scott is into computers, so I thought House of Bots could be a clever name for a property. The nickname I gave to my youngest is Cute Stuff, which I also thought could make a good property name.
For our first Costa Rica purchase, however, we named it after our oldest. Boom is a nickname she’s had since she was a baby. (Interestingly, she has always been a quiet person, so Boom is not at all descriptive, but nevertheless it stuck.) Our oldest speaks almost fluent Spanish and has the Pura Vida attitude, so naming the Costa Rican property after her fits nice.
The property is not a house, so House of Bots makes no sense, and Condo Bots sounds horrible. Our youngest is a Francophile, so holding out for a French cottage that we could name Maison des Choses Jolie (House of Cute Stuff) made more sense for her. {It also gives me a reason, however tenuous, for scouting real estate in France!). Condo Boom fits our oldest and has the added cleverness of also being a real estate phrase (e.g., the condo boom in Florida…)!
While the dual meaning for condo boom is fun for us, it’s tough on branding. People looking for our property will have to wade through real estate articles on actual condo booms. Our Condo Boom will likely never rank high in search because far more people will search for a real estate market-related condo boom than our specific property. It still makes me chuckle.
Inherited names can still have meaning
Casa Salita was the existing name for the property when we bought it, and we decided to keep it. The house had belonged to a print shop owner who raised his family there and kept his work studio on premises, in what is now the guest casita. Casa Salita was an established property that people in the area knew about, so we wanted to continue that history.
As it turns out, salita is Filipino for words. I’m Filipino and a writer, teacher, keynote speaker, so having a House of Words is meaningful after all, even if we inherited the name!
A name can just be for fun
For our third property in Costa Rica, we backed into the name, Condo Reeves, after too much wine at dinner with our real estate agent and property manager. Tamarindo is a surf town, and the table talk turned to “Point Break”, the popular surf movie starring Keanu Reeves. This somehow turned into brainstorming about how great it would be if Keanu Reeves was seen in Tamarindo or bought a property here. Tamarindo being such a small town, our real estate agent thought such a rumor could easily spread.
Next day, same real estate agent takes us to see a condo that was not yet on the market, and we nicknamed our secret scouting mission, Condo Reeves. It was just meant as a continuation of the joking around from dinner, except that the off-market condo was actually decorated with film memorabilia. Now, our joking around intensified to include all the ways we could deck the place out with Keanu Reeves memorabilia – decorative bus figurine, red pill candies, what can we use for a time machine?
We never did decorate the place as an homage to Keanu specifically, but the name stuck. I love movies just like the previous owner, and if you’re not a Keanu fan, you could just imagine it’s named after Steve Reeves or the multiple people from this Wikipedia list in the entertainment business with the surname, Reeves.
If you are a Keanu fan, I highly recommend Keanu Reeve’s Excellent Adventure by Marc Shapiro. I mentioned it briefly in my reading list of 2020 books. Before the book, I was a casual fan – not a hater like some people, but also not a rabid fan like others. Reading about his 70+ films and daring career decisions (e.g., turning down millions for Speed 2 to do Hamlet at a regional theater in Canada) made me even happier to have his name on our condo!
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Now that Costa Rica is all taken care of, we can turn our attention to different geographies and the search for House of Bots and Maison des Choses Jolies.
Do you have names for your real estate?
We are Scott and Caroline, 50-somethings who spent the first 20+ years of our adult lives in New York City, working traditional careers and raising 2 kids. We left full-time work in our mid-40’s for location-independent, part-time consulting projects and real estate investing, in order to create a more flexible and travel-centric lifestyle. 
Financial independence and early retirement is not something we originally focused on, but over time realized it was possible. Our free report, 
