Archive for August, 2007
I am working on the new events page at the new Livtopia web site and I couldn’t help but think that this house would look great here. It probably looks even better in Campeche and if you want to visit, you can take in a whole 4 days and nights for free. Check our events page over the next few days for details. That link won’t work yet, but I will also be sending out the news by email the moment we have things finalized. Sign up for the newsletter for the moment it is anounced. You can sign up from the bottom of any page at Livtopia.
Among the other info I am working on with this property are these key investment points:
- The project has the backing of the local and national government
- The project has been personally endorsed by the President of Mexico
- Exclusive 18-Hole Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Course
- 11 world class golf courses planned for the area
- Plot faces North and West providing spectactulart sunsets over the beach
- 2.6 kilometre white sandy beach amid miles and miles more
- 150 berth private marina and yacht club
- 2 years guaranteed rental leaves no liability until 2010
- All apartments are fully fitted 2 FREE weeks stay a year
- Water rarely goes below 23 Degrees year round
- Prices include 10 years Golf Membership
- Prices include 5 years Marina Membership
- 85% of all properties have sea views
- Values are predicted to double across Campeche within the next 4-5 years
- Low deposits down of only 15% on exchange and 15% 6 months later
- 70% mortgages available at low European rates
- Very high quality construction across the development
- Low prices NOW at early stage of release
- Good resale value on all properties for investors
- Resort is the first of its kind in the state of Campeche
And that’s of course just the beginning.
August 28th, 2007
I thought this was pretty interesting, from Realtor® Magazine and it even uses the c-word, “concierge,” right in the middle. It’s a short article so you can read the whole thing without too much trouble.
Real estate brokerages say title insurance, home warranties, mortgages, and appraisals no longer fall into the category of ancillary services, as consumers’ desire for one-stop shopping have prompted them to offer these as core services.
“Fifteen years ago, the consumer’s expectation was, ‘Hey, sell my house.’ Now the expectation is: ‘Sell my house, get me a good loan, figure out how to get it closed with the title company, get it all done for me — I’m busy,’” says David Sobel, a Home Warranty of America sales executive.
Livtopia isn’t a real estate brokerage, but we are able to offer just about everything in a Buyers Representation-Customer Service and Concierge Package that everyone gets when they purchase a house through Livtopia. Plenty of things are optional, and a lot can go through affiliated partners, but still, you can take care of nearly everything with just an email and a phone call.
August 28th, 2007
Via the Go-Oaxaca blog, nice news to see from Travel & Leisure magazine. Both the capital city of Oaxaca and San Miguel de Allende make the top 5 in their Mexico, Central and South America “World’s Best Cities” listing.
August 28th, 2007
Well, not me personally. But many of you have seen that banner at the top of the current Livtopia page, and you’re probably wondering when it will come down. The answer is, sooooon. We’ve been struggling to get the new Livtopia site launched before the AARP expo in Boston and it looks very much like that will happen in just the next few days. A soft launch we can call it, but it promises to be a blockbuster with everything you could possibly want to retire or find a second home or get a house that promises to increase in value. If you’ll be in Boston September, 6, 7 & 8, we’d love to meet you. The Expo is free at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center and promises to be a ton of fun.
August 27th, 2007
Via the Boomer Chronicles, these are definitely worth a look. Some of the most virulent anti-boomer blogs I’ve ever looked at. HA HA HA. I never really thought about it, but trolling around as I just did on The Worst Generation Ever you’ll find gems like this:
Ironically, I have great respect for previous generations. They did some amazing things. Fought two world wars. Explored and settled a continent. Fought a revolution and founded a country based on the principals of liberty. They based their lives on the ideas of thrift and investment. Frugality was not a dirty word but an ideal that was exemplified. Debt was abhorrent to all the generations before yours.
Every generation left the country better than they found it. Each generation lowered the national debt and increased the standard of living. Each generation advanced freedoms beyond what had existed prior to it.
Unfortunately you are the first generation in U.S. history to leave the country worse than you found it.
Ouch! I’m not even going to touch the obvious “leave the country” joke. From WGE you can turn to Die Boomer Die, where headlines like “Freedom eclipsed: the boomer culture of fear” and “They’ll buy anything: status-hungry boomers seek cutting edge lawn mowers” make up the regular diet. Generational Helots takes a more macro-economic view of things, but it’s just as biting.
Regular readers here know that I tend toward the arcane in seeking answers to big questions. In this case, I started thinking about Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. Is it just that there were so many Boomers newly thrust into a society that had been, only a decade before, a community? Thus normal morality broke down and was replaced by an impersonal ethics to which boomers found adherence increasingly difficult?
My own generation, X, was named by marketers, too! When our name was first bandied around some 20 years ago, I had the distinct impression that there was a media aspect to it, a punk-rock inspired edge, and that it was clever that the marketers had picked up on this. Some trend-watcher had noticed that we were not only tired of the media, but we had been outrightly abused by media. And we wore our bruises proudly.
And then we realized that this was just more manipulation. It was clever to find things in common amongst us, within one generation, just like it was clever to find commonalities amongst people of a particular race. But even more clever is finding commonalities across generations, across races, or across target markets. One of the problems we face is that so much of our vocabulary, even our epistemology, is dictated to us, from on high, and with it comes our badly challenged ethics -how we treat each other. Boomers, I know fully well, are learning not only from those who came before them, but are just as often learning from people younger.
August 24th, 2007
I’m keeping an eye on Mexico Today where they’ve warned:
WARDEN MESSAGE
On behalf of U.S. Consulates in Merida and Matamoros, the U.S. Embassy Mexico City strongly encourages American citizens in the areas of Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, Merida and Matamoros to depart no later than 24 hours before Hurricane Dean is scheduled to make landfall under its present course. The U.S. State Department has authorized departure for all dependents and non-essential personnel at the U.S. Consulates in Merida and Matamoros. Hurricane Dean is expected to make landfall on Monday, August 20 somewhere between Cancun and Tulum in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. The hurricane’s current track shows that it may pass near Merida, Yucatan on Tuesday, August 21 then veer north toward Matamoros.
Check regularly with Mexico Today for the latest.
August 19th, 2007
FYI, I’ve actually written already a wee bit about the housing bubble and the sub-prime crisis. Yes, even here in the land of all things sunny in real estate, where we are more interested in discussing the difference between gorditas and fried tacos than in mortgage rates, we do try to keep our eye on the bigger picture.
For that, I will recommend that even those of you who despise economics read “Panic on Wall Street” by Andrew Leonard in Salon. So you don’t get the impression I think this is the sine qua non in the current conversation, there is a healthy conversation taking place after the article with every metaphor aggressively pulled apart and chewed over.
But what’s this got to do with buying your house in Costa Rica or Panama or Mexico? Are mortgage rates in the US going to look just as expensive as they do south of the border where old fashioned competition is actually starting to bring them down?
Well, Leonard does explain succinctly why everything has a ripple effect that affects everything else.
Try reading an SEC filing from a New York investment bank - it is one of the most difficult-to-comprehend documents ever created by the human mind.
It is not, in a word, transparent. It serves the opposite purpose: It is an instrument of obfuscation. Because of failures of regulatory oversight, we have very little idea who owns what, or what risks hedge funds and pension funds and municipalities and mutual funds are really exposed to. This is all fine and dandy if your goal is to prevent your competitors from understanding what kinds of bets you are making. But it becomes a much more severe problem when you’re trying to figure what is going wrong when the trains start derailing.[…]
Speculators in the world’s financial markets also like leverage; but they don’t use crowbars to move objects — they use borrowed money to make bigger bets. This is fine as long as your bets pay off. But when your bets go bad, the people whose money you borrowed want it back.
Right now, a great many people want their money back.
We’re on the front row of people cashing out of their assets in the US housing market. Many of them aren’t cashing in every single chip, thank god, but we are confident that people see the value in riding out the storm in a different place where the quality of life is such that some ups and downs don’t ruin every day. And a long term commitment is sometimes the very best medicine for everyday woes like short-term returns.
August 17th, 2007
Quite a fascinating article in USAToday a few days ago, that is well worth a read. All the research we are doing for the Concierge is culminating in some great new services for seniors, including a listing section for nursing care facilities in Mexico. These are not going to get smaller or less important over the next few years.
Hawley’s USA Today article starts with the dreamier side of things,
For $1,300 a month — a quarter of what an average nursing home costs in Oregon — Douglas gets a studio apartment, three meals a day, laundry and cleaning service, and 24-hour care from an attentive staff, many of whom speak English. She wakes up every morning next to a glimmering mountain lake, and the average annual high temperature is a toasty 79 degrees.
“It is paradise,” says Douglas, 74. “If you need help living or coping, this is the place to be. I don’t know that there is such a thing back (in the USA), and certainly not for this amount of money.”
But it’s not easy running a long term care or assisted living facility in Mexico or anywhere else. You’ll want to do your research, and for that, we’ve had the people at Livtopia’s Concierge talking to as many people as they can. According to the USA Today, these are how some of the numbers look.
Number of for-profit nursing homes:
• USA: 9,900
• Mexico: 288
Cost of a home health care aide: (per hour)
• USA: $19
• Mexico: $9
Cost of a homemaker-companion: (per hour)
• USA: $17
• Mexico: $2-$5
We’ll announce here just as soon as we get our completed listed of companies and facilities in order.
August 17th, 2007
Check out some of the statistics in this post from the CareShare Network Blog on the Japanese aging phenomenon.
Today, individuals 60 or older comprise 20% of the country’s population, but by 2050 this figure will become 50% as the [population] dips to 90 million from the current 125 million.
The toll of this generation’s retirement is an 89% yearly increase to the $70 billion Japan currently spends on elder care, Masahiro Mori, health and welfare secretary at the Embassy of Japan, told the Erickson Tribune in its chronicle of the issue.
Yup, that’s an 89% annual increase from the $70 billion they are already spending. According to the original article at Ericson Tribune:
Japan’s citizens do not want rising costs to destroy what they have developed over the years. “Our health care, pension, and long-term care system is known for its quality and reasonable prices,” Mori says. “It is number one in terms of equality and provides twice as much care as in the U.S.”
August 14th, 2007
Here is another hopefully helpful excerpt from our E-Book, Retire Better™, which you can purchase for immediate download from the web-site.
Things to Pack
Mexico can be a formal country, particularly in matters of dress, so wearing the right clothes is important. You are not expected to dress like the locals but out of politeness, it is nice to dress a little formally, trousers, a nice shirt, blouses and skirts, especially on evenings out. Full-blown tourist costumes have been known to draw unwanted attention, though of course this is less true at beach locations.
As the temperature can get rather hot, jeans can be uncomfortable, especially in humid locations, so comfortable light trousers are advisable. The sun can be extremely powerful so sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat may be another good addition to your luggage. You’ll want to pack appropriate to the weather conditions of the place you plan on visiting.
All of the upper altitude and inland locations we recommend experience micro-climate conditions and so quick but very heavy downpours of rain can happen with little notice. These are usually refreshing and dramatic events, but travelers who’ve packed an umbrella or raincoat tend to enjoy them a bit more.
[…]The complete list of what bearers of an FM-T or FM-3 may bring into Mexico, as it is released by the immigration department of the Mexican government, is as follows:
- Suitcases, trunks, valises, and hampers necessary for baggage
- New or used consumer goods necessary for their personal use, such as clothing, shoes, items for personal hygiene. These must be in accordance with the length of the passenger’s stay and not in quantities that would appear to be sufficient for sale.
- Medicines for personal use. Psychotropic drugs must be accompanied by their prescription.
- One still camera, one video camera (and its power supply), up to 12 rolls of new film or videocassettes, one cellular phone, one pager, one pair of binoculars, one typewriter, one new or used portable computer (laptop, notebook, etc.), one portable printer or copier (new or used), one portable radio (new or used) to tape or reproduce sound (or for mixed use).
- Two types of new or used sports equipment suitable for one person to carry; one tent for camping plus camping equipment; one surfboard, with or without sail; four fishing rods with their accompanying gear.
- Five laser disks, five DVDs, 20 compact disks (CDs) or cassette tapes, books and magazines which show by their quantity that they are not for resale.
- Any equipment necessary for the care and well-being of a handicapped person.
- In addition to the above, any adult may bring into the Republic up to 20 packets of cigarettes, 25 cigars, 200 grams of loose tobacco, and up to three liters of wine, beer, or liquor.
Those driving into Mexico may bring an additional $50 worth of new goods into the country without paying duty. Those traveling by car may carry an additional $300 worth of new goods. Visa holders may bring household goods valued at up to $1000 US over and above what is listed above without the need for a customs agent to file the paperwork and to assist you.
If you plan to bring household goods into Mexico with a value greater than US$1000, then you need to use the services of a customs agent to work with you to determine the duty values and assist you in the process of actually bringing your belongings into Mexico. Livtopia’s Concierge can help you to find a qualified customs agent. The duty is normally (though not always) valued at 17% of the declared value of your household goods over and above the allowed value.
August 13th, 2007
That’s it so far. There are more photos of this new Mexican project at the Costalegre Community Forum, for which you’ll need to register in order to read. The forum is part of the always lively website, Sparks Mexico.
For some background though, this news came from the really interesting and obsessively comprehensive blog at materialicious. Readers really must take a look there to see what these recycled container homes end up looking like. There are projects documented, from concept to completion in every corner of the world.
August 12th, 2007
We’re polishing up the details in preparation to announce the Free 3-day “On-the-Ground” events in Campeche and Panama City, and we’re learning a lot about what people want from the same 3-Day totally free event we’re holding in Puerto Vallarta in October. That one is filling up fast… and you can click here for more details. It all really comes down to where you want to go.
We’re working on a similar event to be held, for free in Costa Rica, probably in November, and another for Mazatlan and probably in Ixtapa, soon after.
A lot of people have written, mostly in reply to the most recent newsletter, to ask how these can possibly be totally free events. The simple answer is, plenty of people are interested in having you take a look at Puerto Vallarta and at the other locations we’re featuring. Most of these will be 3 day events, some will be 4. We’re talking right now to people who are interested enough to get you 3 nights for free in a nice hotel in Puerto Vallarta so you can relax, get to know the area and then make an intelligent decision that you can’t make just by staring at pictures on the internet.
August 10th, 2007
Once during the heady days of my youth I was forced by financial need to crawl around a vineyard with a pair of clippers and harvest grapes for 8 hours per day. This went on for 2 weeks, after which I was forgiven the debt for my rent of a small house in the Tuscan hills and returned to my full time study of red-wine consumption.
If you’ve never experienced the Vendimia, (Vendemmia in Italian) I can’t recommend highly enough an experience close to my own. There is something about the fatigue of agricultural labor that enhances the experience of agricultural product by about 10 fold.
But let me go a step further. Remember when school used to start, and how, by early September you were so eager for life and glad to be back with your friends in some kind of routine. As September progressed,those weeks could just glow with potential. So much so that the season itself seemed to fill up my lungs with living and the charge of autumn turning cool seemed to make everything more alive and to send rushes of clarity through my whole system.
In what we think of as everyday living and life, such clarity can seem positively surreal. That’s part of the reason I thought that photo above was appropriate for such a post. Some of us put school behind us forever, and we lose that seasonal charge, and September passes like any other month, nondescript like April. The Vendimia is the grown up way to experience that same charge again. Surreal as it seems, it’s a terrific way to start the autumn with a heightened appreciation for the luxury that living really is.
Check out the websites of the wineries listed on the Fiestas de la Vendimia homepage, events taking place through most of August. Of course, you can see a list of all the events and activities involved with the Fiesta, but even a few of the wineries websites will give you a taste of the spirit of the region. I frankly detest snobbery in wine drinking, but I am happy to applaud pride in wine-making and there is lots to be proud of. The image is from the Adobe Guadalupe website, though the website of Vinisterra also will give you a great intro to the wines of the region and it’s one of the more open about process and environment.
August 8th, 2007
I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, that pretty much the whole Livtopia crew is working 12 hour days to soft-launch our new site in the next week. A big part of that work is in announcing and preparing our new totally FREE on the ground events. The events page is coming alive. We’ve got reservations coming in for Puerto Vallarta, which includes a boat tour of the bay and more PV than you could think of in just three days. And and we’re planning to announce events, again, totally free, in Campeche and Panama City in just the next few days.
We’re planning on hosting the FREE events in all four countries by the end of this year and in at least a dozen of our current crop of 28 featured locations in Mexico by early next year. And you can expect that list of 28 Featured Locations to grow too:
- Acapulco
- Manzanillo
- Reynosa ! ? ! and some other out of the way places.
- Not even to mention the -yet to be determined - new Featured Locations in Costa Rica!
We’ll almost certainly be hosting a free 3-day vacation weekends for people interested in Costa Rica and Dominican Republic and probably soon in Acapulco, too. Mazatlan is not far down the road and neither is San Miguel. Everything in time, but the good part is we’ve worked out a way to make them totally free, meals included, 3 days with tours and learning and mouch much more!!
Of course, i keep saying we are also re-launching Livtopia’s MexRetire.com, Livtopia’s Concierge, and a new site just for Mexico City to coincide with Livtopia’s NEW corporate re-location site, MexLiving.com. You think you got stuff to do?
August 3rd, 2007
A nice post by Jaqueline at Move.com led me along to this BusinessWeek article on “How to avoid unpleasant surprises when you buy overseas real estate” from a few weeks ago. The article states pretty plainly that the process of buying property in a foreign country is a lot more complicated than what you are used to, which honestly may or may not be true. BusinessWeek also quotes a lawyer who states some very plainly good advice.
…a Washington (D.C.) realtor who works with clients seeking properties abroad, suggests that once you’ve identified a location, search at realtor.org/international to find an agent who has passed international property courses and agreed to abide by the U.S. National Association of Realtors ethics code. She says before hiring anyone, you should conduct phone or e-mail interviews with several candidates, check their Web sites to see the types of properties they list, and meet face-to-face to get a feeling for their experience and capabilities.
If you want an experience closer to what you might expect in the United States or Canada, a good place to start is clearly with a realtor who adheres to the ethical guidelines established by the US National Association of Realtors. Though, once you start looking beyond the US, that is not always such an easy task.
Livtopia is a member through our membership in AMPI (Asociación Mexicana de Profesionales Inmobiliario) but we apply the same guidelines not only in Mexico but throughout all of the countries where we’re doing business.
The REALTORS® Code of Ethics is a pretty massive document. You can download it in a .PDF or MSWord Version from here. It is a bit longer than the Ethics Code of the National Association of Exclusive Buyer’s Agents, to which we also adhere, but both are a good set of guidelines no matter what country you are hoping to buy in, relocate to, invest in. The trick is to find a realtor or a buyer’s agent willing to learn them and then to stick to them. We’re hoping to make that trick a lot simpler.
August 1st, 2007
