Just over a week ago, I flew to Costa Rica.
And before you roll your eyes, yes, it was for work. I’m a lucky guy, what can I say?
But three days on the ground with a pair of international real estate scouts from Ronan McMahon’s Real Estate Trend Alert (RETA) team was, in fact, work.
We toured multi-million-dollar properties in master-planned communities modeled after Italian hill towns.
We also visited new project sites you won’t find by searching online.
I noticed the golden-sand beaches were busy in what was supposed to be the “off-season”.
Safe to say, Costa Rica is the place to be right now.
I didn’t just come back with a tan and post-trip depression…
I came back with a sharper perspective on international real estate.
Most people think of Costa Rica as a lifestyle destination. Beaches, surf towns, vacation homes.
Ronan looks at these markets the way I look at fundamentals on a company’s balance sheet.
He looks for constrained supply, infrastructure shifts, rising demand, pricing disconnects, and asymmetric upside.
What I saw on the ground confirmed what his team has been reporting for some time.
Costa Rica isn’t a real estate story. It’s a scarcity story.
And one specific market is the last real chance to own true beachfront property in the country.
In 1977, Costa Rica passed the Maritime Zone Law. In plain English, it took the first 200 meters of every beach in the country and put it under government control.
The first 50 meters are public. Nobody can own them. The next 150 meters are leased to private holders through 20-year government concessions, not sold.
That means only 5% of Costa Rica’s oceanfront is titled freehold. The kind of ownership Americans take for granted at home, where land can be freely sold, inherited, or mortgaged.
The other 95% is leasehold from the government, with all the restrictions that implies.
And the small slice that is titled? It almost always lands in the hands of luxury hotel chains like the Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton Reserve, the Andaz, and the Waldorf Astoria. These are the players that can afford to develop the rare freehold parcels.
A retail buyer almost never sees a true titled beachfront deal in Costa Rica. The ones that do exist sell for prices that only make sense for a hotel operator with branded residences.
That’s the supply side of this market.
While the supply has been legally capped for nearly half a century, the demand has been quietly accelerating.
Costa Rica’s tourism arrivals just crossed 1.9 million through the early part of this year.
Direct flights now run into Liberia (the country’s Pacific airport), from Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and a dozen other U.S. cities.
The drive from the airport to the coastal resorts that used to take three and a half hours now takes thirty minutes on new highway infrastructure.
The country is no longer remote. It’s a four-hour flight from the East Coast.
And the money is following the access.
The development next to where I stayed in Las Catalinas is being built by Steve Case, the founder of AOL.
The homes around it are selling for $2 to $15 million. Those are U.S. prices… in Costa Rica.
When the guy who built one of the biggest tech companies of the 1990s is putting his own capital into the same Pacific coast you used to need a four-wheel-drive to reach, you are not looking at a speculative bet.
You are looking at a transformation that is already happening.
Most people get this market wrong from the start.
If you fly down cold and start looking at houses on the open market, you are paying the prices I just told you about.
$2 million on the low end, $15 million on the high end of a normal range, not the outliers.
That’s the dumb way to do this.
The reason I flew down with Ronan’s team is that RETA works the other side of this market.
RETA scouts properties two and three years before the broader money arrives, negotiates group-buying power on pre-construction projects, and gets members in at prices not available to a retail buyer walking off the plane in flipflops.
The track record speaks for itself. RETA members have been making returns of 60%, 70%, and sometimes 90% on properties over the last few years.
Lots near Ojochal doubled in seven years. Two-bedroom homes near Playa Flamingo went from $286,800 to $500,000 in just 17 months.
And right now, the team has secured something exceptionally rare.
A titled true beachfront project on a 2.5-mile stretch of beach in Jacó, the closest beach town to Costa Rica’s capital, San José. About an hour from the airport on the Caldera Highway.
For years, Jacó was known mostly as a laid-back surf destination. That’s changing rapidly.
Luxury development is arriving and higher-end buyers are showing up. Pre-construction condo prices moved roughly 6% in a single quarter earlier this year.
According to Ronan, the new deal his team secured isn’t beach access, isn’t “steps from the beach,” isn’t across the road from the sand.
It is true titled beachfront. Step out from your condo, past your resort-style amenities, and directly onto the sand.
In a country where only 5% of the oceanfront is titled and almost all of it is owned by hotel chains, that’s a category-defining piece of inventory.
I asked Ronan to walk me through what he expects this deal to do over the next several years. His response:
“With this deal, we’ll have a chance to lock in what I believe will be gains of $223,000 just five years after taking the keys. These are luxury condos in a best-in-class true beachfront community. Our condos are going to be in massive demand as rentals. Short-term I’d expect $50,200 a year in gross rental income. That’s a 17% gross yield. And I’m being conservative.”
I have known Ronan for more than 20 years. He’s not the type to blow an opportunity out of proportion. When he says he’s being conservative on a 17% gross yield, that’s the floor of what he expects, not the ceiling.
This Tuesday, May 19, @ 2 p.m. ET Ronan is joining me inside Monument Traders LIVE.
We are going to walk through what I saw on the ground, the specific Jacó deal, the numbers behind it, how RETA negotiates off-market pricing for its members, and how this particular project came together.
Ronan is also going to open this deal to attendees of the session. That part is unusual. Normally these projects are reserved for paying RETA members only.
If you’ve been thinking about diversifying trading profits into international hard assets, this is the right conversation to be in the room for.
ADD THIS EVENT TO YOUR CALENDAR
 |
FUN FACT FRIDAY
Costa Rica saw a whopping 660% spike in residency applications year-over-year recently, catapulting it into the top four global residency programs favored by Americans.
This residency boom (tied to its “pure life” lifestyle, stability, and incentives) is supercharging real estate growth.
It’s drawing high-net-worth individuals and expats, with projections for a net influx of over 350 HNWIs in 2026 alone, bringing roughly $2.8 billion in investable assets.