Protect Yourself - Avoid Our Mistakes!

We bought our property for the view, emotion and misplaced trust in our agent. We mistakenly used the “Attorney” that our agent recommended and he turned out to not represent our interests. Even though our agent spent months cultivating a friendship, including inviting us to their house for dinner, the end result, in my opinion, is that they were simply cultivating a commission.

We take full responsibility for the end results as we proceeded with the purchase without verifying any of these assumptions. Do not buy property this way.  Be smart and learn from our list of mistakes!

• Find a reputable real estate agent.  This is very hard to do because real estate is unregulated in Costa Rica.  We don’t have a foolproof answer but you might want to read our comments concerning agents.
• We did not have a good attorney. The attorney we was not solely working for us. Be very leery of the attorney your agent suggests.  Make sure you use your own attorney and that she or he only works for you.
• The Urgency Factor - Ignore it!: The agent told us that he had “just found the property and we were the first to look at it.” Once it was under contract the agent told me that I needed to close quickly because the seller could back out as the seller’s brother had told him that he sold the property too cheap. Lastly, the agent told us that the scout needed his commission and wanted us to close as soon as possible.
• We did not walk 100% of the property. We believed the real estate agent when he told us that it was over a kilometer long when it was only about 500 meters long.  After the purchase, we discovered that construction is prohibited on 30% of the total area.  This is one reason that personal inspection is so important.
• Our agent told us that it would only cost $2 - $3K to bring electricity to the property. We accepted this as an accurate estimate for utilities but the real cost is between $12,000 and $25,000.
• Our agent pointed out that water was right across the street. In fact there is a water pipe there but it is not potable.  We did not verify that the water was safe drinking water. It isn’t and we will have to wait until the water district expands their distribution system to bring water to our property.  Nobody can tell us when but we have heard estimates of 3, 5 or 10 years.
• We didn’t ask a topographer (surveyor) to look at the property until after it was purchased. After we purchased the property, we discovered that much of it was to steep to be used for building purposes.  Had a topographer inspected the property, he could have warned us about the unusable area.
• We believed the quoted size in the escritura used to draw up the contract. We thought we were buying 83,000 square meters of land, when, in fact, we purchased less than 50,000 square meters.
• We chose a talented architect from San Jose to create the subdivisions for our property. He, unfortunately, had no idea on how to subdivide agricultural land properly and knew nothing about the 10% give away law. Had we used his design, we would have lost one of the prime lots. Thankfully our topographer caught the architect’s mistakes before they became permanent.
• About 6 months after we had purchased our property, our neighbor contacted us and demanded we record a servidumbre (an easement) against our property giving him a right of passage. We discovered that our “Attorney,” who is a friend of the sellers, inserted a clause in the contract that gave him the right to demand the easement. This clause was not requested by us and it is evident that the attorney was not working on our behalf.

The agent we used has stated that he is very sorry for the problems we encountered and that he learned a lot from our experiences. Needless to say, that doesn’t change our situation.  Unfortunately, there are several other clients of his that are in the same boat and his learning experience has cost all of us a lot of money, time and grief. All of this could have been avoided if we had taken the time to do our own due diligence research instead of relying on friendship and presumed knowledge.

We have no one but ourselves to blame for our surprises. Now that you have read our story, you can see how an agent may not always be on your side. Remember, they are in business to make money and they only make money when they sell something.

Here is the correct way to buy property. Save yourself headaches and dollars, and read this section at least once.