New Trash & Recycling

Although the economic crash hit coastal areas of Costa Rica hard, Tamarindo continues to recover and make some progress in certain areas. Here are a couple updates that are positive for the community.

First of all, new trash and recycling receptacles have been placed all over town.  These are very upscale and have space for signage that has yet to be filled.  We’re curious what will be placed on these, but getting better handling of trash and recycling into the community is a step in the right direction.

Hotel Milagro, on the corner between Best Western and the soccer field, has now been torn down. Word on the street is that the owners want to do something more upscale. It’s nice to see the town progressing.

The section of town around our office at Plaza Tamarindo continues to improve.  Wok & Roll is open again and is now offering raw oysters.  The snack shacks a couple doors toward the beach have now been renovated into a sort of outdoor food court with many affordable options.

Lastly, construction has begun on a new gas station closer to town.  We have really needed a Tamarindo gas station for a long time. Located in El Llanito (a little North of Villareal), the site is on the main paved road.  We can’t wait to see it open as driving to El Llano/Portegolpe all these years is hard on the wallet and the environment.

Mari Hernandez

Mari Hernandez started working at CPM when we were still called Hidden Coast Realty Property Management and our office was in Centro Las Olas across from Pacific Park.  The company has grown a great deal since then including cutting ties with Hidden Coast and moving to our present location in Plaza Tamarindo, and Mari has grown into a leader at the company in her current position as director, overseeing the employees of the company.

We would like to thank Mari for her years of service to our owners and tenants.  She will be missed.

Mari will be continuing her career in real estate at Sotheby’s in San Jose, where she will be closer to family.  We know she will come visit often though.  Look her up next time you are in the capital.

Eddie Davis

As you can imagine, I have been very busy over the last year.  For those of you that do not know, I am completing my MBA at the University of Georgia with a full scholarship and fellowship.  My concentrations are in real estate and entrepreneurship.

Many people asked why a person who had been in business for himself since age 26 would be interested in going back to school. The short answer would be scale.  Attempting to learn how to run a business on the fly in a tiny coastal town in Costa Rica was very challenging and offered great school of hard knocks type of learning.  However, there is a science to running a business and frankly most businesses in the Tamarindo area ignore that.

As the President of the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club at UGA, I’ve pushed to get myself and the other students in front of as many CEOs and start up veterans as possible with the goal of talking about these things.  Taking a small company forward from the human resources perspective and otherwise has been the subject of many lunches and one on one meetings.

In the past, much of Hidden Coast and now Coastal Property Management‘s performance hinged on my personal work output and that was a problem because I was spread too thin to the point of getting calls on my personal cell on Saturday nights and things of that nature.  Instead of having the company solve problems, I was personally solving problems, and that was very limiting for the company.  My job now is to push the company forward.  Much of what I have been working on over the past year has been transitioning CPM by implementing systems and training other people on leadership, communication and problem solving.  This work continues.  The goal being unified service across the company and the ability to grow from there.

We have already done some very cool stuff with the company.  Moving to online bookkeeping was a huge boost for the company because Quickbooks was such a bottleneck.  Data entry was slow, but more importantly, there had to be an interaction for the required reports to get where they needed to be.  Now owners can access their books at any time, and moreover, accountants can access the system and pull the reports themselves directly for purposes such as US tax filings.

A more recent change was switching our calendars to Google calendars.  We now have the ability to work more closely with our channel partners by coding our calendars into their sites.  When we update our master calendar, the units’ calendars automatically update on each site that carries them so huge time savings have been created by eliminating the need to login and update calendars across the various sites we own, not to mention the external sites that carry CPM properties.

Another big project has been creating new channel partner relationships.  In the MBA program, there is a huge emphasis on networking and CPM has taken that to heart.  Some of the more visible places our properties are found are mentioned in blog posts: ForRentCostaRica.com is a bilingual marketing platform for Costa Rica and Shacked.org is a surf travel niche directory of surf lodging.  However, our properties are carried in all kinds of other places, and the response has been fantastic.  I vividly remember sending 100s of rental inquiries to companies who are now competitors when I was a top real estate agent in Tamarindo and never getting paid or even seeing any follow up at all with the clients.  In contrast, CPM has letters of recommendation from channel partners who have made themselves substantial revenue streams sending leads that CPM converts to rentals.

A major undertaking at the moment is to systematize our maintenance processes.  Cameron Compton has been a great addition to Coastal Property Management and her focus is on pushing the maintenance and cleaning work at the company to higher levels of efficiency.  We have always received great reviews as evidenced by our consecutive “Excellent” rankings by Flipkey/Tripadvisor, but we want to save owners time and always ensure that our tenant clients have the best experiences possible in Costa Rica and keep coming back.

Another big push of late has been to move the company forward from a marketing perspective.  We have been pushing the company into the social realm.  We have a following of over 1000 on Facebook, and have recently added a Twitter account.  I have spent a substantial amount of time studying online marketing as that is a huge part of the value we provide to our owner clients.  Most owners have reported that the value of VRBO and Homeaway have declined drastically over the last couple of years in the form of far less frequent inquiries and bottom feeding behavior wherein the tenants reach out to 10 or more owners and attempt to start a bidding race to the bottom.  Our traditional web traffic is up over 50% in the last year, but traditional owner side marketing is hurting.  As an aside, I’m recommending that owners consider working with AirBnB.com, which is the talk of the town in Silicon Valley as something to add in addition to their VRBO and Homeaway accounts.  In any case, one of my personal goals for CPM has always been to provide as many tenant inquiries for our properties as possible.  We’re doing a great job of this compared to our big box competitors in Guanacaste, but we always look to move further ahead.

For the summer, I’ll be pushing through various projects at Coastal Property Management.  Look forward to seeing more changes in the near future.

Eddie

Getting “shacked” is surfer slang for getting into the barrel of the wave.  The site focuses on connecting surfers with lodging in popular surf destinations worldwide.

Shacked.org is still in its beta testing phase, but looks great so far.  We look forward to seeing the site grow and connecting surfers internationally with the fantastic properties available for rent in popular Costa Rica surf destinations such as Avellanas, Pinilla, Langosta, Tamarindo and Playa Grande.

However, green season prices from Coastal Property Management start in May. Why not take advantage and bring the whole family down? You will see all of the flora and fauna in full bloom! You’ll have sunshine in the morning and perhaps scattered showers in the afternooon.

Heavy rains do not typically come to our area until September.

You won’t find them on our Tamarindo site, but we just added Villa Olivia and Casa Mirage to our inventory in Playa Grande.  They are both beachfront homes that are fantastic for large groups.

Cameron Compton

Coastal Property Management would like to welcome Cameron Compton to our team. She will be working in our Tamarindo Costa Rica office.

Read more about Cameron:

Cameron Compton is originally from San Francisco, California. Prior to moving to Costa Rica in 2006 she lived in Lake Tahoe, California where she completed her Bachelors degree in Humanities at Sierra Nevada College.

Cameron has worked in the hospitality field for over ten years with experience in Hotels, ski resorts, restaurants, tennis clubs and Property management. As such she is passionate about her work and dedicated to providing the best possible customer service.

In her free time she enjoys playing with her kids Cyrus and Ramona , surfing and doing yoga.

You can contact Cameron in English and Spanish.

www.flickr.com Go to cpmcr’s photostream

What’s the best way to remember your trip to Costa Rica?  You might say through photos.  CPM recently joined photo sharing social media site: Flickr.  Check out our photos!

Many reviews were of our Tamarindo rentals, but don’t forget that we have great properties for rent in Playa Grande, Hacienda Pinilla and Flamingo as well.

You will find much of CoastalRealtyCostaRica.com in Spanish, but we want to continue to expand our brand in the Spanish speaking market as well. Most of the big players in vacation rental marketing such as VRBO and Homeaway have no Spanish component.

To this end, we are in the process of listing all of our Tamarindo vacation rentals as well as our rental properties in other locations with For Rent Costa Rica, a site that is very well indexed in Google in Spanish. The site carries our calendars and has very nice descriptions in both English and Spanish, an important selling point for the national market.

Google Calendar gives us the ability to place one Tamarindo rental calendar across many different sites that belong to us but also our booking partners and owners can integrate that calendar as well.  We can update bookings across our Hacienda Pinilla, Playa Grande, Tamarindo, Coastal Property Management, and other partner sites all at once.

Owners that use Google Calendar personally can also pull their units booking calendar into their Google Calendar for easy access on smart phones, etc.

Please contact us if you would like to connect a vacation rental unit’s calendar in your site.