QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
Plain answers, for people deciding something.
Most of these are questions somebody asked me on a first call. If you are buying, holding or selling a hospitality asset in Costa Rica or Central America and your question is not here, ask it.
What does an owner’s representative do for a hotel in Costa Rica?
An owner’s representative holds the owner’s authority on the ground. For a foreign investor who cannot be in the building every month, that means someone who makes the decisions that would otherwise wait for the next visit: approving variations on site, holding the contractor to the programme, holding the manager to the numbers that were agreed, and reporting back in writing.
I work as an owner’s representative in Costa Rica and across Central America, in Spanish, English and Dutch. I do not operate hotels. I represent the owner’s interest, build the structure, install the management, and hand it over.
What is operational due diligence, and how is it different from a feasibility study?
A feasibility study tells you what a market will allow: demand, rates, likely occupancy, what a new build could earn. Operational due diligence tells you what this particular building and this particular organisation will actually do once you own it.
In two or three days on site I read the building, the organisation, and the agreements nobody wrote down. You get a written judgement, with a cost attached to each finding: what this asset is structurally prevented from earning, and in what order it has to be fixed. Buyers under LOI use it to price. Advisors working from the desk use it to check what the seller’s numbers do not show.
I am a foreign investor buying a boutique hotel in Costa Rica. What usually goes wrong?
Three things, in my experience.
The first is zoning. On the Costa Rican coast the rules move. Plans reguladores are drafted and withdrawn, protected-area boundaries are redrawn, and the maritime zone, the zona maritimo terrestre, is surveyed, conceded and surveyed again. A plan that was compliant when it was drawn can be waiting on a rezoning two years later. I have had that happen on a project of my own.
The second is the gap between the reporting and the building. Occupancy and ADR can look healthy while the GOP is being eaten by cost lines nobody is reading, and the reporting will not tell you that, because the reporting was built by the person it protects.
The third is owner dependency. An operation that only works when the owner is watching is worth less than one that does not, and a buyer will find that out in diligence.
What is the maritime zone (ZMT) and why does it matter to a hotel buyer?
The zona maritimo terrestre is the public coastal strip in Costa Rica. The first fifty metres from the high-tide line cannot be built on or owned at all. The next 150 metres can, in principle, be held under a concession from the municipality, but only where an approved plan regulador exists and only on the terms that plan sets.
For a foreign investor the practical questions are: where is the maritime zone line actually surveyed on this property, is there an approved plan regulador, is the concession current, and is it transferable.
In some places no plan regulador exists at all, and that changes the question entirely. What you would be buying is not a concession but a position, and what that position is worth depends on decisions that have not been made yet.
If you are a foreign investor looking at a property in or against the maritime zone, I will walk you through what you would actually be holding, how it can be held, and what can happen to it. I read the regulatory ground before I read the building, because for a foreign buyer this is usually the risk that is largest and least visible at the same time.
What does hospitality asset management actually involve?
Asset management is the owner’s side of the table, not the operator’s. It means holding the operation to a plan: rate and distribution strategy, cost lines, CapEx sequencing, the standards the team is actually keeping, and the reporting that lets you see all of it from somewhere else.
In practice I come on a fixed rhythm, read what the reporting does not show, and tell the owner plainly what I would do about it. The deliverable is a monthly written read of the asset from someone who was in it.
I am an absentee owner. How do I know what is really happening in my hotel?
You do not, from the reporting alone. Reporting tells you occupancy, ADR and RevPAR. It does not tell you that the housekeeping team is two people short every Sunday, that the kitchen is buying from a supplier nobody tendered, or that your best manager is three weeks from leaving.
That is what owner representation is for. I get close to the team, and they tell me what the reporting does not. Then I write it down for the owner, with what I would do about it and what it would cost.
What is exit preparation and when should it start?
One to three years before you sell. Every weakness left in place is found in diligence and charged against you, usually at a multiple of what repair would have cost.
Exit preparation means rebuilding the structure first: clean reporting a buyer can verify, removal of owner dependency, a commercial engine that holds without you, and the governance and documents that survive a data room. The goal is an asset a buyer can verify instead of trust.
Do you do valuations?
For straightforward entrepreneurial projects, yes. Where the structure is clean and the earnings are legible, a single operating business, a single property, I can value it.
Complex work belongs with a specialist: multiple locations, group structures, related-party interests. For that I recommend my partner Lisette La Costa, who does feasibility studies and valuations, and I supply the ground data she works from: what the asset actually earns, what it is structurally prevented from earning, and what it would cost to change that. I supply the same kind of data to other institutions.
What is the first capital improvement you make?
The people, before a wall moves. Not because it is kind, but because it is the cheapest return in the building. The first hidden value in a hotel is usually already on the payroll: capability you are paying for that nobody has asked for.
A team that has learned not to speak up costs exactly like a leaking roof: quietly, and then all at once. At Almonds & Corals that work produced a guest rating from 8.2 to 9.2, a restaurant with more walk-ins than hotel guests, and zero turnover in the fixed team in the final year.
How do you decide which capital expenditure comes first?
By what it changes, not by what it costs. Every investment competes for capital, so the question is which intervention creates the greatest risk-adjusted contribution to the asset’s strategy and value.
That also means classifying honestly: what is genuinely CapEx and what is OpEx dressed up as CapEx, how long the asset should really be depreciated, and whether the spend is connected to its useful life and its economic purpose. Small accounting decisions accumulate into a distorted picture of what the asset earns.
What is your background, and what did you train in?
Project management and human resources, and middle management from young. Alongside that: hospitality, addiction care, NLP coach and trainer, yoga teacher training, and construction and architectural history. Buildings and people have been the same job for me from the beginning, and the training follows that.
Then eleven years running the real estate for a private family office, in the Netherlands and in Costa Rica. I bought, held, let and sold on the family’s behalf, I advised the principal, and I sat in the partner meetings of their private equity firm. They used me for two things: seeing what an asset could become, and running the work that got it there.
Prinsengracht 733 in Amsterdam, a UNESCO-listed canal house, was acquired in 2014, restored over three years, and 108% higher in value at the end of it. The Sluismeestershuis in Veere had sunk and had never been supported on piles, so it had to be lifted and underpinned before anything could begin. Ecoral in Manzanillo was a masterplan drawn from the land up. The last of them was Almonds & Corals: a $2.5M capital transformation and a manager who runs it now without me.
Where do you work, and in which languages?
From Costa Rica, across Latin America and the Caribbean. Spanish, English and Dutch.
Alongside my own practice I co-founded CHN Hospitality Partners, a confidential brokerage for hospitality transactions in Central America, and I supply vetted investment opportunities to PROCOMER. I am vice president of Holland House, the Dutch-Costa Rican Chamber of Commerce.
Do you operate hotels, or take a management contract?
Not as a business. I build the structure, install the management, and hand it over. My work is finished when the operation runs without me. At Almonds & Corals, the day it could run without me was the day I left.
For my own clients I will run an operation as an emergency service: a manager walks out, an opening goes wrong, something breaks and there is nobody to hold it. That is temporary by design, and it ends the way the rest of my work ends, with a manager I have selected, trained and handed over to.
How do you charge?
By mandate, not by hour. Operational due diligence is a fixed fee for a defined scope. Owner representation and asset management are retained on a fixed monthly rhythm. Project management and exit preparation are scoped to the programme. I will tell you before we start what I think the work is worth and what you will have at the end of it.
What is the first step?
Tell me about the asset: where it is, what it does now, and what you think it could do. If it is an acquisition, tell me where you are in the process. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.
Can you be brought in for a reorganisation, or to deliver bad news?
Yes, and it is some of the most useful work I do.
A reorganisation means changing what the structure asks of people: roles that were never defined, a management layer the operation has outgrown, a department built around someone who left. I read what the operation actually needs, rebuild the organisation against that, and hold the conversations that come with it. Where the law gets involved, notice, severance, process, that is your lawyer’s part, and I work alongside them.
Bad news is the other half. Owners are often the last to say the thing the team already knows: that a manager is not going to grow into the job, that a concept is not working, that the budget was never real. I will say it, to the team and to the owner, and I will stay through what comes after.
I do it as an outsider on purpose. Whoever says it has to live beside the result afterwards. That should not be you, and it should not be your manager.
I have land in Costa Rica but I do not know what to build on it.
That is the part I am usually hired for first.
Land tells you what it wants if you read it properly: where the water goes, where the light is, which trees cannot be touched, what the access will carry, where the regulations stop you and where they leave room. The answer is rarely the thing people arrive with. It is usually smaller, better placed, and worth more.
Prinsengracht, Veere, Ecoral and Almonds & Corals were my own visions before they were projects. Seeing what a place could become is not something I add on to project management. It is the work.
I bought land and I want to build a small hotel. Where do I start?
Not with an architect, and not with a builder.
Start with what the land and the law will actually allow: the survey, the zoning, the setbacks, the water, the access, the environmental track. In Costa Rica those answers change what you can build, sometimes completely, and they are far cheaper to get wrong on paper than in concrete.
Then the brief: how many keys, what kind of guest, what the operation will need in order to run without you. Then the architect, who will do better work with a real brief than with a dream. Then the budget and the programme, in that order.
Most stalled projects I have seen in this region started at step three.
My architect already has drawings. Do I still need a project manager?
Yes, and your architect will usually be the first to say so.
An architect designs. Somebody else has to hold the budget, the programme, the permits, the contractors and the decisions that have to be made in the week they come up. Those are different jobs and they protect each other: a good project manager keeps the design intact by absorbing the pressure that would otherwise be solved by cutting it.
I work alongside architects, not over them. On my own projects the architect and I have usually been the two people who stayed until the end.
I live abroad. Who runs my build while I am not there?
I do, as the owner’s representative on site.
That means the decisions that would otherwise wait for your next visit get made in the same week: a variation on site, a material that has stopped being available, a subcontractor who is not performing. You get a written report on a fixed rhythm, with what I decided, what it cost, and what is coming next.
A build run by email from another time zone costs more than one run from the site. Not a little more.
What will it cost, and how long will it take?
Anybody who gives you a number before seeing the land is guessing, and you will pay for the guess later.
What I can tell you early is the shape: which parts of your idea are expensive, which parts are cheap and look expensive, what the regulatory track will add in time, and where the risk sits. After the survey and the zoning work there is a real budget and a real programme, and from that point you can hold someone to both.
The honest version of this answer costs you a few weeks at the start and saves a year in the middle.
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