A friend of mine that is a major developer in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize is taking one of his projects in a new direction. While still focusing on the core development plan of a residential community on the ocean, he realizes that the velocity of residential sales is not coming back anytime soon and he is exploring other uses for their huge land holdings. Mike Cobb told me years ago that land only has value when you can do something with it. If is beautiful coastal property but you can’t sell enough homes, it may be better off as cattle land. Mike is now exploring many new uses for the property and this will be repeated many times over around the world. My bet is that food will become even more important than new housing projects well into the future. We all do not need second homes and the people who can afford them make up a small fraction of the market. Congrats Mike and good luck with the project.
The tourism developer Gran Pacifica is planning to complete the Gran Pacifica villa with 300 homes, hotels and condominiums, golf courses and parks, according to the master plan for investment.
Laprensa.com.ni reports that “Leveraging the signs of recovery shown in some of the world’s economies, which seem to have withstood the roughest stage of the global crisis, the tourism developer Gran Pacifica is expanding its growth targets toward agribusiness, energy generation and mining, without abandoning its goal of consolidating residential tourism. ”
The group, which has 1,350 hectares off the coast of Villa El Carmen, in Managua, in the Pacific, plans to diversify its business into livestock and cultivation of maize, sorghum, coconut and neem, power generation and mining. The developer will provide some of the land it owns in that municipality for specialists in each of the above activities. They are in talks which are in the “preliminary [stages with] various groups who are doing soil studies and other things”, said Michael Cobb, executive director of ECI, owner of Gran Pacifica, which also has similar investments in Costa Rica and Belize.
Source: laprensa.com.ni