Real Estate Law – Real Estate in Costa Rica
A lot of companies in Costa Rica has focused on legal assistance to companies that are already in operation as well as those that desire to be established in Costa Rica, as well as investors who desire to purchase properties in Costa Rica. A exclusive service for the “legal local establishment” gives a unique and excellent legal and commercial experience in everything related to needs and procedures that must be followed by those who invest in properties in our country. Our lawyers have excellent experience in Costa Rican corporate and real estate law and can offer legal support in these specific areas. Our assistence structure contains opinions on areas such as: laws, taxes, accounting, which offers a complete support in legal areas.
The range of services covers:
Escrow Agreements, Due Diligence, Purchase Options, Transfer Writings, Rental Contracts
Escrow Agreements: The decision to buy real estate is a big one, and we as lawyers know that sometimes if you are purchasing in a place that is not your place of origin the decision to tranfer funds to strangers can become quite difficult. Having the knowledge that we can offer a 100% secure escrow service to our clients using one of the most famous companies in the world for matters of title guarantees for properties, Title Company, no matter what happens previous to the closing or during the proceedings, your funds are in good hands and only if everything is 100% safe according to the law and your expectations, the funds will be transferred to the seller and the property will finally be transferred to the buyer.
Due Diligence: Costa Rica has one of the safest Public Registries in the area, with excellent technological support, but nevertheless this does not guarantee for the lawyers and the buyers that the property that they are looking to purchase is in optimal legal condition. Our firm for many years has performed due diligence on properties, and after all of these years, we have created a complete list with many areas to cover, for example: the last ten years of the history of the property, chain of ownership, property taxes, registries of encumbrances, annotations, claims, variations in property registry maps; we also analyze the seller, his history, when he bought the property, etc. The final report demonstrates a complete scenario of what the client is looking to buy.
Purchase Option: We give complete support during the process of negotiation until the signing of the option contract. In this case of processes or agreements, our lawyers concern themselves with performing the process of due diligence on the property, trying to give the potential buyer the complete information around all legal areas that will affect the purchase of the real estate. The preceeding includes areas such as taxes, annotations, encumbrances, chain of ownership, generally covering the past ten years. In our daily life of law we have managed to observe that the seller pressures the signing of an option with the least possible time, and in many cases this makes the buyer hurry and eventually causes conflicts. Keeping that in mind, we work from the legal point of view and we counsel general questions so that the agreement remains in legal margins.
Transfer Writings: Once all of the required proceedings show that everything is legal and everything is in line with the expectation of the buyer, the transfer writing involves a very important decision to take. Usually, the lawyere only transfer the property to the client following his instructions, but the decision must be taken taking into consideration the benefits, and future pros and cons. The lawyers also must take into consideration the reason for which the client is buying the property and the use that he will give it. Once again the impacts from the point of view of taxes must be taken into consideration if the the property is acquired as a real estate asset or as part of a commercial business.