Built by people who
hit the wall first.

A small group of us were looking at land in Costa Rica. Some of us had moved to this beautiful country to build a future here. Others were traveling down for investment opportunities. Some of us were building. Some of us were investing. Some of us were just trying to help family and friends not lose money on a beautiful idea that turned into an expensive mistake. We came in with capital, experience in other markets, and what we thought was a reasonable plan. What we found was a market that runs on information that isn't easy to access from the outside.

Asking prices on similar beachfront parcels could shift by 40% across different listings, often for reasons that made sense to people who had worked the market for years but were invisible to anyone coming in fresh. Two parcels a kilometer apart could trade at completely different multiples. The market intelligence we needed existed. It just wasn't centralized, not searchable, and not surfaced anywhere a buyer could easily check.

There were lessons we only learned by paying for them. Properties within the Maritime Terrestrial Zone come with concession requirements rather than fee simple title, which materially changes what a buyer is actually purchasing. Parcels close to the water trigger additional regulatory layers that don't show up on a listing page. Zoning, setbacks, and use restrictions vary canton to canton in ways that aren't obvious until you're deep into due diligence.

We did what every developer and buyer does. We walked parcels. We worked with brokers. We surveyed Encuentra24 in spreadsheets until our eyes blurred. We compared notes with other developers who had been there longer. And we still missed things; markets that were quietly heating before the prices caught up, parcels that looked like deals but sat in volatile micro-markets we didn't fully understand, and worst of all, properties where the water situation killed projects after the deal was already done.

The water piece was its own education. In Costa Rica, water availability and the right to draw from it can determine whether a parcel is worth full retail or worth nothing at all. ASADA moratoriums, AyA service area boundaries, well concession status. These things are knowable, but they are not centralized, not searchable, and not surfaced anywhere a buyer can easily check. We watched good projects stall and good capital get tied up because the water reality didn't match the listing description.