By Doug and K.T. Ingersoll - April 2005

After our second visit to Petite St. Vincent we arrived home with a new determination to find our island. We need an island big enough to hold the facilities we envision. We want the resort to be in close proximity to excellent diving locations, yet within easy reach of the airport. The land needs to have fee simple title located in a country with a stable government and growing tourism industry. Most important, it needs to be affordable.

We searched the internet nearly every evening looking for something that fit our Caribbean dream. We were amazed at how many islands there actually were for sale. We found that the well-known destinations were considerably more expensive than those less traveled. Most of the islands that met our requirements, we simply could not afford. The search was a long and frustrating process made more difficult by the lack of up-to-date information. Most Caribbean real estate companies rarely update their websites and even more rarely answer an e-mail. The few times that we did receive a response, language barriers prevented detailed conversations.

Buying land in a foreign country was probably the most unnerving part of the plan. How do we know we own the property? How do we know the person who sold it to us actually owned it? How do we know the government won’t take it away someday? How do we know the government will still exist in the future? We don’t! We would need to complete extensive research before we would feel comfortable with any foreign purchase. We found it fairly easy to locate property ownership information for each country that we were considering. We learned that some countries have significant restrictions on foreign ownership while others don’t allow it at all. Many more countries only offer leasehold land. All of these limitations helped to narrow down our search areas.

One area where we consistently found islands for sale was in Belize. It also has a stable government, is an English-speaking country and is becoming well known as a vacation destination and scuba diving hot spot. But there is not an organized system of marketing real estate there. To gather information was labor intensive and tedious. We had to contact each person or brokerage individually and request information about the properties they had for sale. Most people never responded to our requests. The few who did were either too pushy or wrote in virtually unrecognizable English, or both. We often found the same parcel of land for sale with many different brokerages. Amusingly, each would have a different price, different description and even different acreage, but always the same pictures. Once a property is on the market, it appears that anyone can add the listing to their website and pretend it’s their own. Yet, when you ask for information about the property they don’t know anything. They haven’t even seen it! This made us extremely skeptical about any information we received. We would always ask, “Is this your listing?” “Have you talked to the Seller?” “Have you ever personally visited this property?” It’s kind of a real estate free-for-all. It appeared that anyone who wants to be a real estate agent could just print some business cards,make a sign and voila! You’re an agent!

It was during this lengthy process that we began communicating with Billy. He was the only agent who consistently e-mailed us

Filed under: Islanders