By Ivo Henfling

Moving to Costa Rica is easy, if you want to spend the money on paying your moving company to pack your dishes and everything else for you. It is also pretty easy to move if you just throw it all out and start new in Costa Rica by buying all new stuff. 

Moving Home Boxes are available online and you can do most of the work yourself, although we recommend using a profesional packing company or moving company, so everything will arrive in one piece.

Most don’t realize that they will have to pay taxes on everything they bring, as soon as the container hits customs in Costa Rica. But that is for another blog, another day. Today, I’m going to tell you about how to pack your dishes and breakable articles.

By Ivo Henfling

Years ago, we would all get hundreds of flyers in the mail, offering all kinds of services and products. Some years later, we would get all these faxes in the middle of the night, because it is cheaper. Then the spam emails started, hundreds of them, every day. The latest waste of time and a huge bother for many is phone calls and text messages from banks, cable TV services and the phone company, offering their newest services.

I wish they were just offering, sorry, I should say PUSH their services. It drives me nuts. I sell products myself; I sell real estate in Costa Rica. But I send you only a blog once a week, and if you don’t want to receive it, you just unsubscribe from the service, you will never get it again. Financial institutions have other ideas though.

By Ivo Henfling

Great news!! GoDutch Realty was recently approved by International Living® and their commercial division Pathfinder, as their representative for the Central Valley of Costa Rica. AND we are invited to attend their next convention in Cancun, Mexico 21-25th February 2012. Rudy Matthews and Ivo Henfling will fly out to Cancun and promote Costa Rica property for sale in Cancun.

To be accepted and approved by International living is like winning an Academy Award in the international retirement and investment real estate community. For GoDutch Realty, it’s definitely an honor to be able to represent International Living® in the Central Valley of Costa Rica and to be able to attend their thousands of clients who are looking to retire to Costa Rica or invest in the Costa Rica real estate market and where they can compare all the options they have.

By Ivo Henfling

Moving to a new country like Costa Rica can be difficult, especially if it’s a country where they speak a different language and have a different culture.  There is definitely the uncertainty of the unknown mixed with the anticipation of starting fresh. If you really want to live that happy life when moving here, you need to work at it. While you’re doing your on-line due diligence, you may be thinking about how to settle in and how you will get familiar with your new surroundings. GoDutch Realty has been relocating hundreds of newcomers for many years that moved to Costa Rica to retire or just start a new life. No matter if you are going to relocate to Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua or Ecuador, I'm sure you can use a few great tips to help you introduce yourself to your new community.

By Ivo Henfling

Costa Rica has never really had a good MLS system and that is mainly because the two Costa Rica real estate boards have not organized themselves enough to make it happen. And most real estate agents in Costa Rica prefer 50% commission of nothing instead of working together. This makes it harder for a buyer to find the right home or lot for sale and this in turn makes many buyers not stay loyal with just one agent.  I turned in my CCBR (Cámara de Corredores de Bienes Raices as well as CCCBR) real estate license many years ago for the same lack of organization.

To my opinion, having a license from the CCBR real estate board doesn’t give my agents or me any value at all, except maybe for the 4-day course they teach and without doing an exam, you’re entitled to call yourself a licensed CBR real estate agent in Costa Rica.

By Ivo Henfling

I would like to share this funny story with you, just to show you that when you think you’ve seen it all, you find you haven’t. This is not a fairy tale and though all the actors involved in this novel thought about suing the writer, we decided that this seller either has a serious psychological problem or he is just a great writer, wasting an opportunity to become famous and make a lot of money. When things like this happen, I always think about how boring life would have been if I would have stayed in Holland and wouldn’t have moved to Costa Rica.

Let me tell you a bit about the author first and how I met him. Many years ago, our GoDutch Realty office sold a property in Escazu to a North American client. The single man lived there for quite some years, remodeled the home and then one day called us again that he wanted to sell.

By Ivo Henfling

On New Year’s Day 2012, it was such a beautiful day, Dany and I decided to take a day trip to Poas volcano. As usual, because we never use a sweater in Costa Rica, we forgot to bring any and I was cold for the first time in years.

It is normal that instead of snow, we get a lot of wind in December and January and the weather was no different on this 1st of January.

I always find the trip to Poas one of the nicest daytrips in the Central Valley, no matter if you live in Escazu or anywhere else. Even after 30 years living in Costa Rica, I still enjoy the beauty of this country.  I drive to the courthouse in Alajuela and from there, drive up to Fraijanes de Alajuela (I marked it on the Google Map below).

By Ivo Henfling

The long discussed tax on corporations in Costa Rica was just approved. The first time I wrote a blog about the tax the Costa Rican government proposed on corporate tax was in December 2010, so the approval has taken quite a while.

That doesn’t mean, it’s 100% that this will all happen because the Costarican citizens have the option of what’s called Sala IV, a court where they can stop a train running at 100 miles an hour. But for now, congress as well as Costarican government has approved the new tax, and it is coming into effect on April 1st, 2012.

By Ivo Henfling

Many of us who have moved to Costa Rica come from cold places. Most of us did so because of the nice weather in Costa Rica, amongst the best in the world. If I look at my list of clients, I have people from New York, Portland, Kelowna and even less cold places like Berlin, Amsterdam and Los Angeles where it still gets to temperatures of around 30ºF or zero Celsius. I even have one client who still works in Kazakhstan and comes home to Atenas once in a while to get warm, he must be freezing his butt off right now. Most of us moved to Costa Rica to never be cold again.

By Ivo Henfling

Nothing is better for business than a good service to your clients. In my business, Costa Rica real estate, I have always tried to excel in service as to my opinion it means the continuity of your business and it is a lot easier to keep an old client happy than making new clients. But mostly the larger business like banks and insurance companies have a hard time making their employees understand what good customer service is and end up with lots of frustrated clients. I am one of those who complain when service is bad. But I also think that when people do a good job, they deserve a pat on the shoulder.

This time it is don Isidro’s turn for a well-deserved pat on the shoulder. Who the heck is don Isidro some of you might say? Those who have asked me, after closing on their house, where to get their home insured and their car insurance, or a medical insurance, know who don Isidro is. Isidro gives an extraordinary service as an insurance agent for INS, learn how he keeps his clients happy.