You will encounter probably the single most bothersome aspect of owning real estate in Costa Rica (and living there) soon after you enter a car in search of property: the roads in Costa Rica are almost never good, and they range from the poorly maintained to the abysmally bad. We who live here wish we had a dollar for every incidence of hearing a cab driver complain about the state of the roads. While roads and real estate are two distinct things, they are related in a number of ways. Poor roads mean lower property values, a longer drive from the airport to your home, and increased building costs. One notable exception is the coastal highway that winds south from Dominical, a beach town on the southern Pacific coast. That road is excellent, but few here expect to see more of the same anytime soon. If it helps, think of the roads as an aspect of Third World charm and funkiness. Bad roads and all, people are still arriving to buy property.

Mention should be made of several other problems with infrastructure that you might encounter. In remote areas of the country, access to electrical power sometimes requires an expensive investment; if you build a home that is far from other homes, you might have to foot the bill for stringing up power cables over a considerable distance. (The advantage of buying land within a development is that these projects usually come with electricity installed.) Depending on where you buy, you might also have difficulty getting a land line for telephone service or find yourself without access to cell phone service or cable TV (satellite TV service is available throughout the country). Don’t despair, however, as nearly all communities in the country now offer some form of telephone service. Gas for stoves and other appliances is not delivered to the home via a public utility; you simply purchase tanks of gas from local suppliers and are thus assured access to gas wherever you live. You wouldn’t expect that a country composed of rain forests might experience occasional water shortages, but that is the case. To understand how this happens, it helps to note that the Pacific northwest, which is where the majority of people who want to live near the ocean are buying property, is a microclimate of dry, savanna-like terrain. Also, reservoir water, in addition to serving the demand for drinking water, is also used to generate electricity—and to do that, water must be released from the reservoirs. When you are choosing a property, it is thus vital that you make sure that your property has access to water year round—in both the rainy and the dry seasons.

Driving through urban areas of the Central Valley—indeed through any area where people live—you will note something that characterizes nearly all of Latin America. As often as not, neighborhoods are a hodgepodge of attractive and not-so-attractive homes, and, even in the suburbs, it’s not unusual to find homes and businesses existing side-by-side. Zoning laws, when they exist and when they are enforced, generally are so liberally constructed that they allow for a wide range of possibilities. Sometimes, this leads to neighborhoods that are diverse, vital, and fun to live in; if you are unlucky, though, you might end up with a discotheque next to you. As always, choose your neighbors and your neighborhood wisely. Posher neighborhoods do exist in a number of areas of the country, but their existence is explained more by economic factors (i.e. expensive land reduces the number of people who can afford to purchase) than by zoning restrictions.

Up until a couple of years ago, obtaining financing for the purchase of a home in Costa Rica was a frustrating experience, and for a number of reasons. First, loan applications were long and complicated to complete; second, processing of loan applications took a lot of time; third, the terms of the loans, some of which are stated in a mix of both dollars and colones, were difficult to analyze; finally, many banks were only willing to finance 70% of the mortgage and at a maximum length of 15 years. Fortunately, the credit market in Costa Rica has changed dramatically in the last couple of years and several banks now offer loans, with no residency requirement, that finance substantially more than 70% of the mortgage and with longer terms of payment—up to 30 years. Even processing of loan applications has sped up as banks vie for business. Though tough global credit conditions at the time of publication of this book make getting any kind of loan more difficult, credit is still available.

In northern climates, architects need to design buildings that can withstand extremely hot and extremely cold weather. Not so in Costa Rica, where climate in the Central Valley and at beaches rarely calls for more than a light jacket or sweater. Along the coasts, where it is often hot and humid, many people do choose to have air conditioning installed, though some people are perfectly comfortable relying on just fans. Even if architects in Costa Rica are freed from taking into account cold temperatures and snow when they design homes, they do need to consider a number of other factors. These include heavy rains during the wet season, sometimes intense sunlight during the dry season, wood-loving bugs, mold caused by humidity, and the occasional earthquake. None of these considerations, however, dramatically adds to the cost of the building or significantly changes its look. In Costa Rica, we are obliged to admit, the biggest design constraint is probably the security features that are needed to protect homes against burglary. High walls surrounding homes, bars on windows, and alarm systems are increasingly a part of modern living in many parts of the worlds, including Costa Rica.