The road was the reason they chose the house. Unpaved, unhurried, ending at a beach most maps undersold. They bought for the silence between the waves.
Two dry seasons later, surveyor stakes appeared in the treeline across the road. Then a sign with an architect’s rendering. Then, with the bluntness particular to heavy machinery, the silence ended.
A boutique hotel and beach club. Forty rooms, two restaurants, eighteen months of construction directly across from their gate.
Nobody had hidden it. The permits had been moving through the municipality for over a year before they ever saw the house.
The construction phase was as advertised: trucks at six, dust on everything, generators on bad days. They priced their options — sell into the noise (a discount), wait it out (a grind), or rent the house long-term to construction management (an irony they ultimately accepted, profitably).
Then it opened. And the arithmetic flipped.
The road got paved as part of the project’s concessions. Two restaurants now operated within walking distance of their gate. The beach gained lifeguards and lost none of its character — forty rooms is boutique, not Cancun. Within eighteen months of opening, comparable homes on the road were trading meaningfully above their pre-construction values, and theirs had a paved road and a dinner reservation it didn’t have before.
“We’d still rather have known,” she says. “We’d have bought it anyway. But we’d have bought it knowingly.”
Development cuts both ways. The only unforgivable version is the one you never checked for.
The Story Timeline
The Cost
Lessons For Future Buyers
Insider Perspective
Buyers ask us 'is anything being built nearby?' The better question is 'what could be?' We map permits and land ownership around every property we advise on — surprises in Costa Rica are usually just unread public records.
Where They Are Now
They eat at the beach club most Fridays now. The fish is good. The silence, they admit, was overrated by about fifteen percent.
Considering Potrero? You can read the unfiltered local take on this area, or talk it through with us before you fall in love with anything.
