New San Jose Homes
Price of real estate in Jaco Beach can vary greatly depending on what you are looking for. If you are looking for a small bungalow close to the beach you can pay as low as $30,000 but if you are looking for beachfront property the prices can vary from $75,000 and up.
Even though Jaco does not have the most beautiful beach in Costa Rica it is still one of the happening places for expats as it has a great night life and offers many of the amenities found in larger cities.
Santa Ana, an up and coming area of Costa Rica that is looking to be the next Escazu.
Only 15 miles away from San Jose, Santa Ana is a small community that is fast becoming the next big development area amongst expats.
Santa Ana offers modern homes at about 20% less than Escazu while offering similar taste of homes with great restaurants like the Cebolla Verde and Tex Mex. For people that love shopping, Santa Ana offers several modern shopping centers. Combined with its many natural springs and convenient location next to the Inter-American highway, Santa Ana is a fast growing community.
Grecia, a Little Community with Lots to Offer
Grecia is a nice little town located approximately 27 miles from San Jose on that has a nice expat community.
While the Grecia area is an agricultural community, the town of Grecia offers plenty of attractions like the Snake Museum, the Los Chorros waterfalls and many colonial cathedrals. Grecia is a popular spot for foreigners who are looking for a friendly community at very affordable prices.
The price of homes in the Grecia area ranges from $50,000 and up which makes it very attractive to American expats wanting to live close to the city and hot have to pay the higher prices of Ecazu.
Even though these are the top places where foreigners and expats choose to establish themselves in, one must not forget that Costa Rica is full of great areas that even though may not be very popular are still great places to live in.
On a recent episode of HGTV's "Selling New York," the CORE real estate group took over the marketing and sales for a historic building located in Chelsea. Upon visiting the model units to assess what was needed to get the units sold, the Realtors noticed an inconsistency in the current marketing efforts with the overall theme of the building. In their efforts to re-brand the marketing, they needed to transform the "stark white" campaign of the collateral and the real estate staging to align it with the context of the building by creating a warmer and more traditional feel. This included putting a darker stain on the hardwood floors, stripping the paint off of an architectural column, painting the walls, rearranging the floor plan and revamping the design style altogether.
This brings up the point I make regularly that "making it pretty, doesn't make it sell". During their tour of the larger model unit, one of the comments made was that the furniture was beautiful, but it was not reflective of the building. It felt more like Miami than Chelsea.