Lorri and Buzz's How NOT to Buy a House in Puerto Rico

If you missed our first blog post, you should probably stop reading here and go soak up some of our blind optimism before you read any further. 

If you're still here we will assume you read our first blog post and knew we were somewhere in the process of negotiating for a house in Puerto Rico. We promised at the end of the blog that we would show everyone how NOT to buy a house in Puerto Rico, and we are NEVER ones to disappoint our readers.

Now, please keep in kind that we have been planning this life changing event for years. That's right, years. We have read everything there is to possibly read about the Puerto Rico real estate market because we are very smart people. Sure, there are countless stories involving even professional real estate agents from the states coming here and getting hard knocks lessons from what they have called the wild west of real estate that is the market here, but unlike those poor saps, we are very smart people, so nothing to fret over here, folks.

Ah, The joyous faces of unbridled optimism!

After a mere two hours of sleep following a red-eye flight to Aguadilla, we were up, excited and ready to go see our new dream home! What a great day this was going to be!

We have spent weeks looking at photos of this house online. We have had disclosures, and even had an engineer give the thumbs up on everything. This sneak peak was essentially a mere formality prior to the close a few weeks down the road. 

From the start, however, things did not seem just as we had hoped. It was, as promised 250' from the beach for instance, but that is 250' as the crow flies, and doesn't account for the 30' wall of eroded rock that stands like an impassable barrier between the home and the water. But no worries, there was still the great view of the ocean. 

There were a lot of other things as well, but in the end the real deal breaker were the families in the surrounding homes. We are coming here to be good neighbors first and foremost after all, so we wanted to meet the neighbors. I am not entirely certain how many houses full of people we met around our dream house, but I can tell you that every house you could see from the elevated wrap around deck were relatives of the old man who had lost the home in the wake of Hurricane Maria. He must have had 20 children and each of those had 20 more, and in the end it was just the sort of foreclosure that we would fight back home to help save a family farm by refusing to bid on it. 

So, our dream is ruined and all is lost and we are walking away from the thing. There were far more reasons to run and not walk away from it, but the foreclosure of the home the man built with his own two hands was enough icing on this here shit cake for us to not want another bite. 

We were, after all of it, broken defeated and hopeless shells of the people we were in the early morning hours. All had been lost. There was only sorrow. 

Were it not for Lorri remembering our favorite Puerto Rican beer, we may well have tossed ourselves into the ocean and prayed for the sharks to come. But Lorri also reminded me that the best part of Puerto Rico is the ability for the people who live here to face death, calamity, injustice, and every sort of storm, with hope and celebration, because as long as you are breathing, there is always tomorrow, and even if tomorrow never comes at all, there is the right here and now, so bring on the Medalla, the rum, the music, and dance! Except for me, of course, because Lorri says I'm not allowed to dance in public. 

And here we are, finally back at the room, nightcap in hand, preparing for the opportunities of a new day in the morrow. Stay tuned, kids, because this will not be the last hiccup we encounter. If there is anyone at home hoping to see us fail miserably, they will be in luck more times than one. However, if they are waiting to see us quit...it won't happen. We already have a few homes to look at tomorrow. Until next time!

"You are never given a dream without also being given the ability to make it come true. You may however, have to work for it."

 - Richard Bach