I am originally from the town of San Isidro de Coronado in the central valley of Costa Rica, about 30 minutes from the capital, San Jose. When I was a kid growing up there in the late 70s and early 80s, I remember playing with my cousin Freddy in the jungles and rivers adjacent to my grandmother’s house. We used to swing across the river from the vines that hung from the trees. We used to travel all the way up the river with our rubber boots on while we explored the jungle. These days that river is so polluted that I would not dare put my foot in it, even with rubber boots. It turns out that as the town got more populated the municipality did not keep track of where people were discarding their garbage and waste water, so the river beside my grandmother’s house is nothing like what I remember.
After those days of playing in the river next to my grandmother’s house, I spent a lot of time in the U.S. I graduated high school, then went on to earn a Business Administration degree. I have an uncle that is very successful in business and I always admired him for it, even though he came from a poor family. Knowing that in business the sky is the limit, I decided to get into real estate. At the time, the real estate market in Miami was booming, agents were making thousands of dollars at a time buying and selling real estate, so it seemed like a perfect time. Florida requires real estate agents to be licensed, so after I got mine I thought I knew everything about real estate and the truth is that I had only scratched the surface. It turns out there is so much more to real estate than what meets the eye. They teach the laws required to hold a license but they don’t actually teach you how to survive and make money…That is something that you must figure out on your own. Luckily, I am decently ‘book smart’ and can actually learn pretty much anything from books. This started my yearning for learning about everything that had to do with real estate. I’m sure I still don’t know everything about real estate but I did know enough to make me a top-producing agent in the last two firms that I worked with.
While I was having great success in real estate and extremely happy in my marriage (yes my wife may read this…) something was missing somehow. I have always wanted to move back home and let my kids play in the rivers like I did. This is what brought us to Pavones, Costa Rica. Its pristine and untouched, the locals here did not make the mistakes that were made in other areas of Costa Rica by dumping garbage and sewage into their rivers. We considered many different locations to purchase in Costa Rica. We knew we wanted to be near the beach since we like water activities, like surfing and paddle boarding, so we compared Jaco, Hermosa, Flamingo, Samara, Tamarindo, Manuel Antonio, Dominical, Golfito and our last stop Pavones. While all of those beach towns were really nice, I found that Pavones was the most rural and hardest to get to and that is what made it the most pristine environment I had ever been in. The air was so clean, the water in the rivers was crystal clear, the mountains were full of exotic wildlife, and we were all on board that Pavones was the place for us. There were no websites that we could look at to find properties though. No international real estate agents at all. The closest international real estate agents were in Dominical and Ojochal, about 2-3 hours away from Pavones, so they did not work the Pavones area. We found the ideal location up in the mountains by talking to the locals and having a few different people show us properties they knew about.
Being a Realtor since 2002 in Florida, I was shocked at how unorganized the buying process was. I talked to someone on the phone that agreed to sell me their lot if I send them money. We had no contract, no escrow, just an email to communicate with the seller. Back in Florida I decided that I was not going to send someone a bunch of money without having a contract in place. So I dissected one of the Florida FAR/BAR contracts and I used my electronic signature service to send the contract to the seller after I explained to him that I felt uncomfortable without the agreement in writing. He signed it and I started researching the property on the Costa Rican registry to make sure he was the proper owner and that all was good to go. It was a bit complicated since at that time I had never researched any property in Costa Rica but I figured it out. We closed on the purchase in July of 2018 and we moved to Pavones in January of 2019.
During the purchasing process, I realized that I needed to bring some sort of organization and cohesion to the real estate market in Pavones. I started trying to figure out how to become a real estate agent in Costa Rica and it turns out that any Costa Rican citizen can be a real estate agent as long as they register with the government. So why weren’t there more real estate agents in Pavones? Well, it turns out that it takes more than just wanting to be a real estate agent. You have to become a marketing expert, a business expert, an expert negotiator, an accounting expert and you also need to know the laws of the country. I started doing research on Costa Rican real estate laws, property rights etc.…. During my research I figured out that there were two respectable real estate associations in Costa Rica, the traditional CCBR (Camara de Corredores de Bienes Raices) and CRGAR (Costa Rica Global Association of Realtors). They were both holding their agents to a higher standard and since I was already a member of the National Association of Realtors, the international CRGAR made the most sense to me.
As it turned out they were holding real estate classes in Playa Flamingo, Costa Rica the following month, so I jumped at the opportunity. In those classes I figured out that what I was missing most was Costa Rican laws. I was already a marketing and business expert, however what was a ‘ZMT zone’? These classes were taught by a Costa Rican real estate attorney and the president of the CRGAR association. It turns out that the president of the association, Mr. Allen Lungo happens to also run Keller Williams Costa Rica and gave me a brochure about joining his team. In my opinion, Keller Williams had the best marketing program in Costa Rica, so I joined KW in an effort to give my client’s properties the exposure that was missing from the Pavones area. By joining CRGAR I also gained access to the MLS system used by both of the major Costa Rica associations and most of the larger companies like Coldwell Banker, Remax, Century 21 and of course Keller Williams.
I am now, as far as I know, the only international real estate agent in Pavones, Costa Rica and the surrounding areas. I am the only real estate agent in Pavones with access to the Costa Rica MLS (CRMLS). When I upload your property to our MLS system and to the Keller Williams worldwide platform you get the exposure that was missing in Pavones. You better believe that I will be going above and beyond what you would expect from a real estate agent. We do professional quality photos and videos and upload those to the MLS, which in turn sends them out to all of the most popular websites in Costa Rica for real estate like Point2homes or Encuentra24. My next post I will explain what some of my major marketing points are and how they differ from what some of the local agents do. If you would like to sell your Playa Pavones property or if you are looking to purchase one, I’ll be glad to help!

Eric Chavarria
Real Estate and Construction Consultant.
Keller Williams Costa Rica