Who is Bill Adams and why should I take his advice about real estate in Costa Rica?

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This was a few years before the movie “Midnight Express” came out so we were lucky to not have any preconceived ideas of what to expect, but apparently, we were expected.

Our pictures had made the front page of every national paper with a story about how a couple of dangerous Sandinista spies and saboteurs had been captured. Since almost everyone in the Penitentiary was either a Sandinista or a suspected Sandinista, we were greeted like conquering heroes and long lost brothers. I made some good friends who eventually went on to become important players on the Nicaraguan stage in the years to come, but that’s another story.

After about 10 days and some very challenging behind the scenes interventions, we were released and made our way back to Costa Rica by public bus. The days of open borders were over and armed revolution was to be the predominate factor in Central America for the next 10 years. Instead of becoming the “next Hawaii”, Costa Rica became the “land that time forgot” and a sunny place for some very shady people.

During this period, I was privileged to work as the manager of some of Costa Rica’s finest beach hotels and the country’s foremost tour boat operation. I met and mixed with many of the country’s elite and a few of it’s most notorious characters, made good money and moved in a fast crowd. I learned who to trust and who to be careful of in the local business community and as all hotel managers do, I learned to be discreet. I also learned how to put together a functioning team of disparate individuals to achieve a common goal, something that was sorely lacking in the local tourism industry at the time and a lesson that has served me well here.

Because of the political turmoil in the region and the global recession during the 80’s, tourism was suffering and eventually some of the hotels I worked in were for sale. I became involved in the sales efforts and developed a “taste” for the real estate business.

In 1998, after an intensive eight week company course, I became the first American to manage a Century 21 franchise in Costa Rica, and one of the original 12 Century 21 brokers in all of Central America. After five years of selling property in Guanacaste, I moved back to Escazú, where I had built a house in the mountains many years before. My oldest son was now in the University and San Jose offered better educational opportunities than did Guanacaste, regardless of the fact that the whole province had become a booming real estate market with the opening of the new international airport.