insidecostarica.com
| Dom, 01/17/2010 – 08:19
The new autopista a Caldera will be inaugurated on January 27th, one week before the national elections, Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias, announced in Puntarenas on Saturday.
“For the first time I made it here (Puntarenas) in 50 minutes by way of the new highway”, Arias told a crowd during a tour of the Pacific port town.
The section between Santa Ana and Orotina of the new San José – Caldera highway that is not yet open to the public, had been scheduled to be open in March, pushed up from the original June opening date when construction commenced two years ago.
However, advances in the work enable it open early.
President Arias called the new highway a “gift to Puntarenses”, saying that Costa Rica has waited almost 40 years for this highway to become a reality, for the port city to have easy and fast access to San José and vice-versa.
The new road allows travel between La Sabana on the west side of San José to Caldera, south of Puntarenas, in less than 45 minutes. Currently it takes between 90 and 120 minutes to make the same trip.
The savings in time is because the highway cuts through the mountains, eliminating the steep climbs and drops on the current routes, as well the slowdown in traffic caused by big trucks and buses.
The sections between San José and Santa Ana and Orotina and Caldera have been open since last year, remaining was the middle portion.
The cost of tolls to travel the 77 kilometres of the new highway, from end to end, is about ¢1.500 colones each way for passenger vehicles and motorcycles, more for heavy trucks and buses.
- Copyright Ameurope Global Services 2009
As light begins to peek through the dark clouds of the worldwide economic crisis, members of the Costa Rican real estate community are growing more optimistic at the tail end of what has been, for many, one of the worst years they can remember in the housing market.
Rising Above: The Costa Rican real estate market appears to be reviving after taking a major hit during the recent worldwide recession. These condo towers in Jacó, on the central Pacific, are examples of pre-recession construction.
“In 2009, there was very little movement in the sale of homes,” said Charles Wanger of Bienes Raíces Talamanca Real Estate, in the southern Caribbean region. “In the 12 years I have done real estate in Costa Rica, 2009 was the first year I was unable to fulfill all of my own financial obligations.”
Wanger is not alone. Many real estate agents and firms throughout the country experienced substantial drops in real estate sales during the first half to three quarters of the year. The difficulties experienced in the real estate market stemmed from the worldwide economic crisis, as well as from the fear engendered by the cataclysmic rupture of the housing bubble in the United States.
“People interested in buying property here became more cautious than they’d ever had to be before,” said Christopher Howard, author of “Guide to Real Estate in Costa Rica.”
“A lot of property owners here are from the U.S. and Canada, and they lost some of the funds they’d saved in hopes of buying property,” he said. “The crisis changed their plans and left a lot of people holding off on buying a second home or a vacation home in a foreign country.”
In some cases the crisis forced buyers who had taken the initial steps in property ownership, such as putting down a deposit or paying construction fees, to swallow their losses when their sources of capital were suddenly disrupted. Wanger said that seven of his clients had contracted architects and builders but were suddenly forced to pull the plug on their projects when the economy tumbled. To date, only three of those seven clients have paid the hundreds of dollars in preliminary construction fees owed. The other four claim they will pay when their finances recover in 2010.
A similar plunge in investment in the real estate market also occurred on the Pacific side of the country.
According to Les Nunez, of First Realty in Playa Hermosa in the northern province of Guanacaste, many prospective buyers who arrived before the crisis struck in 2008 made deposits of up to $100,000 on home purchases. However, when their expected financing was restricted, a number of them, unable to pay the remaining cost of their homes, lost deposits of up to six figures.
