Category Archives: baja communities

Palacio Del Mar, a Baja California High-End Private Community Going Green

May 18, 2010

“Palacio del Mar is going Green in all ways possible”, was the main focus of this year’s annual homeowners meeting, in which developers informed of their current and future plans for the community, including the projects which will continue making Palacio del Mar one of the pioneering developments to go Green in the Northern Baja area.

Palacio Del Mar, a Baja California High-End Private Community Going Green

Palacio Del Mar, a Baja California High-End Private Community Going Green

ROSARITO, BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO – Grupo Pes, developers of Palacio del Mar, have over 25 years of experience with a reputation of beauty and quality, are currently finishing the first stage on their newest development, Palacio del Mar. They recently hosted their annual homeowners meeting on April 16th 2010.  This meeting, which informed residents of the developer’s current and future plans for the community, was held at the development’s posh movie theater. “The meeting was attended by homeowners who came from as close as San Diego and as far as Boston. An important point of order was the developer’s announcement that Palacio del Mar would be “going green”.

Pes Developers mentioned that among Palacio’s Green projects are the installation of a solar heating and energy management system, and the installation of a state-of-the-art hydration filter. The aim of these projects is to reduce energy cost for the outdoor infinity pool, as well as, the Olympic size indoor lap pool. The hydration filter will provide soft water to the entire complex and reduce long term maintenance costs by lengthening the effective life of all fixtures and equipment. These new additions compliment the currently installed resource conservation systems which include motion-sensor triggered lighting in all hallways and a water treatment system that recycles gray water for garden and green areas. read more »

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Using a real estate IRA to acquire property in Mexico

May 7, 2010

By TOM KELLY, INVESTMENT columnist

Using a real estate IRA to acquire property in Mexico

Using a real estate IRA to acquire property in Mexico

Like second-home sales in the U.S., the sales of Mexican homes have been limping along. They are a luxury that buyers have been unwilling to revisit until the economy improves. While anecdotal evidence is beginning to reveal increased activity in some of the more popular resort areas, very few developer projects are thriving because of a lack of bank funding or sales.

“We have some buyers who have returned to look and buy,” says Max Katz, who operates Baja Real Estate Group in Rosarito Beach, about 70 minutes south of the California border. “But it doesn’t help when U.S. television repeats the same shows on crime in Mexico that they were showing 18 months ago.”

Much has been written about the kidnappings, roadside hijackings, crooked cops, and the infamous bandidos in some of the regions of Mexico. Most of the violence south of the border, however, is directly related to the drug cartels and the authorities who are trying to eradicate them. There is absolutely no pattern of any innocent U.S. citizens being randomly murdered in drug violence.

Unfortunately, the negativity surrounding the country comes at a time when more and more Americans could use a less expensive place to live. According to a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), baby boomers have not saved for retirement and they will be forced to work longer and/or move to less expensive places than they anticipated. Property taxes, health care, and cost of living will force boomers to consider moving to other countries, especially if they plan on living at the same level of comfort as they do now.

John Youden, the Vancouver, British Columbia native who founded a multiple listing association in Puerto Vallarta in 1988 (www.mlsvallarta.com) and also publishes a highly respected real estate magazine, believes developers will have to offer potential buyers a creative proposition to sustain sales.

A Puerto Vallarta-based group headed by a Harvard MBA graduate took Youden’s message to heart. It is seeking buyers/investors looking for a guaranteed rate of return and has found the offering to be an ideal alternative to conventional Individual Retirement Account investments. One hour south of Cancun on the Caribbean Sea’s Riviera Maya, the company is building a condotel adjacent to Madrid-based Bahia Principe Group’s mega resort. Called Sian Ka’an (www.bahiaprincipecondohotel.com), the development is on its own golf course.

The condo hotel is a gated community with 24-hour security, and it has access via a private bridge to the adjacent resort and its pools, spa, restaurants, tennis courts, and boutiques.

Because Bahia Principe needs additional rooms during much of the year, the corporation is guaranteeing an 8% annual return to investors on their rental unit for seven years, even if the unit is not occupied. Personal use by the owner is allowed, yet owners-investors can also enter their unit in the guaranteed rental pool. After that period, owners-investors can renew the contract or take sole possession of their unit.

To prepare for your real estate IRA, designate the amount of your retirement funds that you wish to use in the property deal and open a new IRA account with an independent administrator.

The guidelines covering real estate IRAs are stringent. If you break one of these rules, you could jeopardize your tax-free status on your account.

  • The land or house must be treated like any other investment.
  • All rental profits must be returned to the trustee.
  • You cannot manage the property. But your trustee can hire a third party – a real estate broker, or local manager – to collect rents and maintain or improve the property.
  • The house or property (or proceeds from its sale) must remain in the trust until distribution at retirement. If a trustee is instructed to sell the property, funds can be transferred to another account for reinvestment.

You cannot use IRA money to buy your own residence or any other property in which you live. It has to be investment property. But when you retire, you can direct your IRA to turn it over to you as a distribution at the current market value.

It’s a creative way to get in the door if you are considering an investment purchase.

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Browse for Rosarito Homes for Sale.

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Culinary Tour of Baja, Mexico

April 25, 2010

Lured by spicy quail, tuna ceviche, and Mexico’s best fish tacos, T+L lights out for Ensenada—and from there, things just go south.
From May 2010 By Peter Jon Lindberg

Culinary Tour of Baja, Mexico

Culinary Tour of Baja, Mexico

Ensenada and the nearby Valle de Guadalupe, in northern Baja, are known outside Mexico for three things: the burgeoning local wine scene, which has been hyped ad infinitum; the food, which hasn’t been hyped enough; and the spectacularly bad roads, which everyone warns you about, though you never fully believe them. Really, you think, how bad could they be? And then one night in the gathering dark you take an innocent shortcut across the valley and drive your rented Hyundai into a riverbed. A dry riverbed, but a riverbed all the same. You and your equally baffled companion spend 40 minutes spinning the car’s wheels in what might as well be quicksand, then digging frantically, then panicking, then digging and spinning some more, until finally you resolve to abandon the car and hike the two miles back to the highway—suitcases sinking in gravel, sand filling your socks. And as the coyotes wail in the ink-black hills you decide that you probably should have paid more attention to that part about the roads.

“Ah, the Baja shortcut!” said our innkeeper, Phil Gregory, when, at the conclusion of said ordeal, he collected us and our dusty belongings from the side of Highway 3. “Never a good idea!” Severe rains the previous week, our host explained, had caused the river to flood, washing away a whole chunk of the road we were on. Those tire tracks I’d followed across the sandy riverbed—believing we were still on course—had been left by a backhoe, dispatched to repair the road. No one had bothered to post a sign, let alone erect a fence. “Honestly, this happens all the time,” Gregory said as we rattled down the inn’s rutted dirt driveway. He meant this to be reassuring. “But let’s get you settled, pour you some wine, and we’ll retrieve your car in the morning!”

Gregory’s tone was oddly chipper—maybe this did happen all the time? After showering off the dust, we sampled the inn’s own Tempranillo beside a crackling mesquite fire in the lounge. Not the smoothest specimen, but it worked: two glasses later I gave up worrying about the Hyundai. read more »

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For some East Bay retirees, Mexico an affordable alternative

April 7, 2010

By Kathleen Kirkwood

Brad Billingsley and his Wife

Brad Billingsley and his wife Linda

Brad Billingsley could have been waiting for his tee time at an Arizona golf course.

Instead, the former Lafayette resident and his wife Linda were in a lagoon off Cabo San Lucas, snapping photos of gray whales bobbing next to their small charter boat.

“Every day, it’s an adventure here,” Brad Billingsley said. “It’s added 20 years to my life.”

Brad, 62, and Linda Billingsley, 61, are among the “silver surge” of baby boomers seeking alternative retirement nests in Mexico, according to a recent report by the International Community Foundation.

It’s not certain how many U.S. retirees are living in Mexico — a 2004 study puts it between 500,000 and 600,000 — but the foundation and other researchers say the number is bound to increase as more boomers settle into their golden years and find Mexico an affordable alternative. Almost half the retirees living in coastal areas are getting by comfortably on less than $1,000 per month, said the report, which cites the growth of real estate projects targeted at retirees as proof that expatriates are flocking south of the border.

The Billingsleys had seriously considered a retirement community with a golf course in central Arizona. But they lacked the enthusiasm for fairway living that seemed to consume retirees there. “Their entire lives were involved with golf,” Brad Billingsley said.

In 2007, the couple became expatriates and settled into a $300,000, two-bedroom beachfront condominium in Rosarito Beach, in Baja California.

They’ve made the most out of their retirement dollars, Brad Billingsley said. The cost of living — from groceries to health care — is low in their beachfront town and there’s plenty to do, such as driving down the coast to Cabo, walking on the beach and shopping at the local mercado. read more »

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How safe is travel in Mexico

March 17, 2010

It all depends on your destination. The State Department warns against travel in the border towns of Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros, but most beach resorts and other historical spots popular with American tourists are unaffected.

Carol Pucci
Seattle Times staff columnist

How safe is travel in Mexico?

How safe is travel in Mexico?

How safe is travel in Mexico?

It all depends on where you’re going.

As a new travel warning by the U.S. State Department (http://travel.state.gov) points out, the areas of concern are not the beach resorts or historical cities most Americans visit, but rather the border towns, specifically Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and Matamoros.

Too often in the past, these types of government alerts have taken a broad-brush approach, simply advising against travel to a country as a whole. What’s different about this warning, issued Sunday following the shooting in Ciudad Juárez of three people with ties to the American consulate, is its level of detail, and the way it rightly targets only towns where drug-related violence has been rampant.

This could have something to do with the fact that Mexico’s tourism economy is fragile, and the U.S. government doesn’t want to do anything that might damage it, but let’s hope it also has something to do with a new, more responsible approach to travel warnings in general.

As the State Department points out, millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico each year, and this isn’t likely to change. Nearly a million Americans live in various parts of the country, enjoying the benefits of an inexpensive retirement and low-cost medical care. read more »

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U.S. retirees find home in coastal Mexico

March 16, 2010

First of five studies reveals price and proximity to U.S. are big draws

By Sandra Dibble, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Monday, March 15, 2010 at 12:04 a.m.

Jamie Reynolds, a 63-year-old retiree who lives in the El Pescador area, watched the sun set. Reynolds, like four out of five of the retiree-study respondents, owns his home in Mexico.

Jamie Reynolds, a 63-year-old retiree who lives in the El Pescador area, watched the sun set. Reynolds, like four out of five of the retiree-study respondents, owns his home in Mexico.

ROSARITO BEACH — Favorite activity: strolls on the beach. Biggest gripe: litter. Primary reasons for retiring in Mexico: the lower cost of living and proximity to the United States.

A newly released study on U.S. retirement trends in Mexico’s coastal communities takes an updated snapshot of Rosarito Beach, Rocky Point, Puerto Vallarta, Cancun and other areas where many Americans go to retire. The study’s authors say their survey marks an important first step in meeting the needs of a group that is likely to grow in size as U.S. baby boomers reach retirement age.

“We felt it was important to understand the dynamics of what is going on,” said Richard Kiy, president and CEO of the International Community Foundation, which conducted the 88-question survey. While research has been done in San Miguel Allende and Ajijic, both well-established expatriate communities in central Mexico, coastal communities “are some of the areas that have been least studied among U.S. retirees,” Kiy said.

The International Community Foundation, based in National City, supports nonprofits and projects in Baja California and other parts of Mexico. Close to half of its donors live in Mexico full time or part time, and that was the initial impetus for conducting the study, Kiy said. read more »

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In Tequila’s Home, a Wine Region Comes of Age – The Guadalupe Valley

March 10, 2010

In Tequila's Home, a Wine Region Comes of Age - The Guadalupe Valley

In Tequila's Home, a Wine Region Comes of Age - The Guadalupe Valley

The first time I went to Mexican wine country, I found myself digging my car out of a muddy river bed at 11 at night. It speaks volumes about the area’s charm that this didn’t deter me from a second trip, four months later. This time, I destroyed one of my sedan’s axles in a pothole and popped a tire.

And yet, I still plan to visit again. Next time, I’ll bring an S.U.V.

Wine tasting in the Guadalupe Valley of Mexico is an adventure sport; not an endeavor for the weak of will. There is the matter of the roads. They are dirt-surfaced, they frequently require that you drive straight through riverbeds and, thanks to a winter of record storms, they currently resemble the pitted surface of the moon. Then there are the obstacles to actually tasting wines: many wineries require appointments, and a working knowledge of Spanish is definitely an asset.

Persevere, however, and you could find yourself at the bucolic ranch of Antonio Badán, sampling a generous glass of elegant Mogor-Badán Chasselas with the winemaker himself. Mr. Badán’s tasting room consists of a folding table in a corner of the small concrete building where he produces his wines. The chairs are wobbly; the walls are bare. From the tasting room, you can look over the vegetable gardens, the henhouse and the grazing cattle to the budding grapevines on the valley floor. read more »

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Baja For Beginners

March 10, 2010

Baja For Beginners

Baja For Beginners

“Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,” the novelist Edward St. Aubyn once wrote. If a vacation is thus a defining microcosm of family life at its presumed artificial best, then it will forever encapsulate your attitude of giving up, or giving in, or putting up a fight, usually at great cost to your nerves and sleeping schedules. It is the family vacations about which your children will brag or complain (or fake-complain) to their friends and future spouses and their own children, as in, “My parents dragged me to Epcot,” or, “My parents made me do the midnight watch on a month-long sailboat trip to Labrador.” In short, this is how you will be remembered.

And so, when we were invited to join two other families on a vacation to Todos Santos on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, we eagerly hitched along. We’d been to Todos twice before with these same friends, but had since collectively amassed three kids, ages 2 and under. What better place, we reasoned, for preconscious children than a town where the coastline is so dangerous and unswimmable that one stretch is referred to locally as Killer Beach? This would be the perfect spot to spend two weeks pretending to relax as our toddlers charged heedlessly and relentlessly toward the 25-foot surf while we — not giving up, mind you — constantly looked after them.

Todos Santos is on the Tropic of Cancer, one hour north of Cabo San Lucas along a cow-frequented stretch of otherwise desolate coastal road. This is the edge of the continent; the entire weight of the ocean rears vertically upward at this precipice and smacks down on the sand so forcefully that at night, even a quarter mile from the beach, the windowpanes rattle in their casements.

According to my co-vacationing friend, the longtime surfer Chris James, Todos first became known among surfing circles for its legendary waves, which were in fact less legendary than the exertions required to enjoy them. As surfers claim, until the mid-70’s, there were no paved roads south of Tijuana (the stretch from La Paz to Cabo via Todos seemed to have stayed unpaved until the mid-80’s), which made the thousand-mile trip from the border arduously slow and surmountable only by four-wheel drives. Adding to the outlaw thrill was the risk that you’d flip your truck on the bad roads or have a gun pulled on you by a Federale. “Basically,” James admits, “Todos was a mildly scenic town with a great fish-taco stand.”

Pilar’s Fish Tacos is, in the opinion of some locals, the indirect reason for the town’s gradual evolution from a mildly scenic town with a great fish-taco stand into a cultlike destination for an incongruous amalgam of gringos. As local myth would have it, the rancher who owned the land around Pescadero, a nearby village, decided, after the asphalt arrived, to open the San Pedrito RV Park. At about the same time — the late 80’s — the artists showed up, as did the first cafe with the first good cappuccino (still available at Caffé Todos Santos). The increasingly artsy vibe attracted the New Agers and the seekers, and soon after, the healers pulled into town. As Charlie Deal, the structural-integration specialist (i.e., nice Rolfer), said of his reasons for living in Todos, “The opportunities for personal growth here are just too great.” (Counters James, “I come here for the personal regression.”)
read more »

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Bonus Rains could mean a Banner Year for Mexican Wines

March 3, 2010

By Steve Dryden

Grape Vineyards in the Guadalupe Valley

Grape Vineyards in the Guadalupe Valley

The 2010 vintage is off and running with a large dose of rainfall soaking the soil and roots in vineyards across Valle de Guadalupe and other grape growing regions in Baja California, Mexico. So far we’ve received an above average level of moisture in a normally drought ridden region, thus bringing extra hope to growers and winemakers for this vintage. Most of the vines still remain in a dormant condition, but bud swelling is evident and it appears that an early bud-break may be upon us soon.

In addition, the winter weather in the valley (elevation avg. is 1,100 feet) has been mild and warmer than usual. Many vineyard managers and workers have already pruned their vines or are in the process of doing so. The only bad news is there are lots of weeds and wild grasses this year, but the surplus of water is a real blessing, making most wine industry personnel excited about 2010.

Highway construction in the valley continues to progress, but at times it seemed we went back in time about 100 years. This wet winter allowed locals and guests the opportunity to ford rivers, streams and large puddles of water as we toured the valley in search of wine, food and adventure. Now we know what it might have been like when the early settlers and the Russian Molokans hauled grain and goods to San Diego with horses and wagons. In 1925, it was a three day trip to downtown San Diego with teams of horses and wagons navigating several rivers between the valley, Tecate and Jamul. The good news is that the new road that traverses the wine country along Highway 3 should be completed by May 2010. It’s open now in some parts, but be ready for road hazards, mud, and dramatic bumps in the various (unmarked) surfaces of dirt and pavement. read more »

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The Baja Blondes in Fox 5 Morning News

February 26, 2010

The Baja Blondes cast makes an appearance in FOX 5 Morning News with Chrissy Russo, Arthel Neville, Raoul Martinez, Shally Zomorodi – KSWB

Click to play video.

read more »

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