Notes from Vancouver
Lolly and I just spent the last week in Vancouver attending the Agora Wealth Symposium which attracted over 800 internationally oriented investors. The topic this year was "America:Fight or Flight" as many people are concerned about an increasingly tax-hungry Washington, D.C. implementing a more "progressive" tax system to fuel big government. William, Fernando & Leslie also joined us and our presentation on Costa Rica: Creating Your Safe Haven in Paradise was well received. We also had over 100 people visit our booth to discuss how owning real estate in Costa Rica could fit into their personal financial planning. Please feel free to e-mail us if you would like to receive a PowerPoint of our presentation.
Vancouver is an incredible city where the climate was in the 70 degree range - similar to the breezy weather in San Jose, Costa Rica. What was amazing was the incredible real estate bubble they are now experiencing in Vancouver. Waterfront luxury condominiums are now selling for $2000 per square foot! That equates to about $4.2 million for a three-bedroom condominium. Now compare that to our condos at Del Pacifico which are selling for about $250 per square foot. The real estate boom in Vancouver has been fueled by a large influx of people from Hong Kong and more recently mainland China and it's estimated that over 20% of all the condos there are purely for investment and are vacant.
At the conference we ran into a number of old friends including Bill Bonner of Agora, Rick Rule of Global Resources and also some of our long time owners at Del Pacifico including Dennis Hopton who traveled from Hong Kong, and Linda Stack from California. We were fortunate to be with this group of people during the budget debate as it became clear that a growing number of people are looking at adding rental resort properties to their investment portfolio for a "just in case" investment; in fact a number of people will be coming to visit Del Pacifico in the next several weeks and we have offered them a special end of summer "friends and family" rate at our beachfront Alma del Pacifico hotel of $157 for a garden villa. If you would like to inquire about this rate please contact our Baltimore office directly for availability.