Adventure is an important ingredient if you want to live a fulfilling life.
But adventure, excitement, and thrilling are words probably best kept away from investment and saved for life experiences.
Buying property, even property you will live on, is definitely an investment. Investments should be pretty boring and predictable. A place to put your hard-earned money that will return more money in the future.
Before you decide to buy anything in Central America you want to know that at the very least it won’t lose money and at best will allow you profit should you decide to sell.
So are Adventure Colonies good investments?
In short, yes.
For those who like a little more detail let me explain how we know the answer to that question.
When you first read Adventure Colony, you are seeing the very last part of an incredibly long process that started about 20 years ago on a beach in Dominical, Costa Rica.
It was then that while living in a shack with no windows on the beach and surfing everyday that I made the fateful decision to buy my first piece of property in Central America. It was a little farm up in the hills behind the beach.
Don’t worry I am not going to ask you to read a biographical account starting 20 years ago, the point is that farm got me started as a professional real estate investor. Since then that is all I have done every day, with the exception of a couple of summer jobs in my early 20’s.
This is the view from the first piece of property I purchased about 20 years ago just outside Dominical, Costa Rica.
I have been learning how to invest in Central America for 20 years. Learning how to find deals, how to create value, where to look, and what to look out for.
Before a project becomes an Adventure Colony, it has to fit the model that Park and I have developed after years of living, scouting, and learning about the region.
As you have seen in this book, part of the way we buy property revolves around look and feel.
A combination of attributes that inspire people to live in nature is extremely important to us, but we couldn’t keep doing what we are doing if we didn’t also have firm grasp on the business side.
Before we even buy a piece of property it has to fit our definition of a good investment. This means months and months of searching, planning, and rigorously challenging the idea of why should we buy “This” property over any others.
How is that good for you?
Great question! First we buy based on market stages, a system we developed to make comparisons between perspective markets in Central America.
We needed a system to give us a framework for comparing towns, opportunities, and customers.
Deciding on investing in established, more competitive locations or taking a chance on an up-and-coming area is critical and only one of many considerations we have to make.
If you like details then you will love this
What really excites us is a Stage 2 market that is about to transition to a Stage 3 market. We have found this is the absolute best time to buy land as it increases in value the quickest during this transition.
This can happen based on larger trends like new infrastructure; for example, new roads, airports, or other projects in the area.
Not only does this way of thinking benefit us, it benefits you.
If you choose to buy in an Adventure Colony you are benefiting from what we believe is an area poised for growth. It has already been through the kind of scrutiny only the best opportunities we see make it through.
This means the pieces are in place for an area to jump to the next stage and by definition that means more buyers and higher land prices when it happens.
You don’t want to be late here or you will miss your opportunity to buy right.
Based on our track record it is pretty safe to say we know what we are doing. (If you want to read about our investment philosophy you can download Pay Dirt! here)
This is 20 years of learning distilled down to a Free 50 page e-book.
Currently both of our Adventure Colonies are poised to benefit from a new international airport in David, Panama.
$29 million has already been invested into the expansion of the airport and now it is only a matter of time before direct flights arrive in David from the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
I am sure you can imagine how that could impact the scales of supply and demand in the area.
Guess what? We knew this was happening before we bought the projects. We also heard that a new road was getting built to our Playa Burica project before we bought and it is now done.
It is a dirt road, but for the first time you can drive all the way to the property without driving an hour and half down the beach. (Which is what we had to do when we first bought.)
These larger developing trends benefit all of us from the investment perspective.
From the pristine wilderness perspective these trends are a little troubling, but if we can attract enough people who really love these areas as they are today, we think they can be incredible for centuries to come.
