About Michael Murphy

I spent twenty-four years doing this in the United States. Then I moved to a country where almost none of it works the same way.

Wherever you are buying from, you arrive with assumptions. That there is one reliable place to see what is actually for sale. That someone in the room is working for you rather than the seller. That the contract is standard, the money sits with a neutral third party, and the survey matches the deed. Very little of that transfers. Due diligence runs through the National Registry rather than a title policy, a notario handles the closing rather than a title company, title insurance exists but is rarely bought, and the MLS is neither complete nor consistently accurate — which is why every site you have looked at shows a different set of houses, some of which sold months ago.

I know exactly what you are expecting, because I spent two decades on that side of it — representing buyers and developers through Sotheby's International Realty and Related Companies in Chicago, one of the most competitive markets in the country. I am not explaining Costa Rica to you from the outside. I am explaining it to you as someone who had to learn it himself, coming from where you are standing.

Today I live here full time and work as a Senior Broker Associate with Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, across the Southern Pacific — Escaleras, Dominical, Uvita and Ojochal — and increasingly on larger estates and titled coastal land on the Osa Peninsula and the Golfo Dulce. I have walked every house on my properties page. That is not a figure of speech; where no listing database is complete or reliably current, it is the only meaningful quality control there is.

Most of what goes wrong here is not fraud. It is mismatched expectations. A buyer assumes a road implies a right of way, or that a well means water, or that titled means the same thing on the beach as it does a kilometer inland. None of those assumptions survives contact with Costa Rican property law, and all of them are reasonable if you learned real estate somewhere else. My job is to ask the questions you do not yet know to ask.

I sign my emails as a luxury and conservation broker and I mean both halves. A great deal of what makes this coast worth buying into is what has been protected rather than built — and there are real mechanisms behind that, including the PSA program, which pays landowners to keep forest standing and which almost nobody in this market explains to buyers.

I am not trying to sell you Costa Rica. I live here. I am trying to make sure that if you buy here, you knew what you were buying.