If you want to move here, I insist you learn about the tope in Costa Rica. As my practice riding sessions continued on schedule, I recalled the team’s uniform requirements mentioned weeks ago during our get acquainted dinner (a black cowboy hat, white dress shirt, black jeans, western belt and buckle, and a pair of…
Estimated Reading Time: 5 Minutes When I started selling properties in Costa Rica, nobody believed in getting home inspections done. Back then, real estate agents were afraid of recommending home inspections because they could lose the sale if the inspection would turn up a serious problem. I am talking about 25 years ago! This morning,…
Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes TicoNuevo starts practicing for his first tope, a whole new experience. One more neighborly communication came through our shared caña India fence. I was reminded of my first horseback riding “lesson”, I needed practicing for my first tope or horse parade. This was going to happen on the first Tuesday…
Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes This is how the wish for my first tope started. Your Costa Rican guide books and online resources probably define a “tope” like a horse parade. Using a very liberal interpretation after my first experience with one, that’s as accurate a description as I can give. Every town of any…
A Costa Rica real estate client asked me to write about medicinal herbs in Costa Rica. This, fortunately, comes pretty easy to me. That’s because my dad, together with his partner, Hendrik Stins, opened La Buena Hierba in 1986. This was the first real medicinal herb store in Costa Rica, although you could find medicinal…
Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes So, we’ve completed 98% of our home improvement project. Friends say that this is the Tico way of finishing things. Honestly, I think it happens everywhere. But allow me to tell you all about it, so you can learn from my mistakes. We have finished the business with my contractor…
Those used to the North American real estate market, always want to know if we can produce a CMA. For those who don’t know what that is, this is a Comparative Market Analysis. In Costa Rica real estate, it is impossible to produce a CMA for various reasons. At least for now, it is not…
Estimated Reading Time: 8 Minutes I’m sure you now want to learn more about the remodeled result of our home. We went through a long and detailed process, but we’re all happy with the remodeled result. We bought our new property in Costa Rica at a price that allowed us to afford all of the…
Planning to import your household container? Then be careful and be patient! Our construction projects continued. And based on our prior inquiries and due diligence, we thought we had timed the arrival of our household container pretty well with our move-in date. The ongoing progress of the work at our house to receive our container…
Estimated Reading Time: 7 Minutes For some reason, new expats who don’t know where to rent, often ask an agent to give them a tour. I never understood why some assume that real estate agents want to drive them around for days, all over the Central Valley. So they can make a commission. I have…