By Diana Granados, GM Attorneys at Law
Picture two neighbors in Guanacaste. They arrived the same year, bought in the same area, came with the same dream: mornings at the beach, a slower pace, a life that finally makes sense. Three years later, one of them is hosting Sunday dinners for a circle of Tico and expat friends, knows exactly who to call when the water pump dies, and just finished a small remodel that went, by local standards, remarkably smoothly. The other one is discreetly looking at listings back home.
Same country. Same budget. Same beach. What happened?
Spend enough time in expat forums and Facebook groups and you’ll see the second story told over and over, almost always in the same words: «I wish someone had told me.» Nobody warned them that the way things get done here runs on relationships, not transactions. That the contractor who shows up on time is the one your neighbor vouched for, not the one with the best website. That when something goes wrong with a property, a residency application or a tax deadline, the worst possible moment to start looking for good advice is the moment you need it.
Because that’s the pattern behind most hard landings we see: not bad luck, and not bad people. Just a plan that ended at the closing table. Many newcomers treat the move as a project that finishes when the furniture arrives. Then real life starts. A permit question. A boundary dispute with a well-meaning neighbor. A notice from an institution you didn’t know existed, in legal Spanish that Google Translate turns into poetry. And suddenly they’re posting in a Facebook group at 11 p.m., asking strangers to recommend a lawyer, an accountant, anyone, please, it’s urgent.
Now look at the expats who thrive. They come in every age, budget and nationality, but they share one habit: they built their network before they needed it.
Not «networking» in the business-card sense. Something older and more local than that. They found their accountant before their first tax season, not during it. They sat down with a lawyer when nothing was wrong, just to understand how their property was held and what that meant. They know a good doctor, a reliable mechanic, the neighbor who’s lived on that road for forty years and remembers where the water line actually runs. When something breaks, and eventually something always breaks, they don’t start a search. They make a call.
That’s the whole difference. Costa Rica rewards people who invest in relationships early, and it can be unforgiving to people who improvise them late. The ones who struggle aren’t less smart or less prepared on paper. They just assumed that trust was something you could order on demand, like a taxi. Here, trust is something you build in advance, slowly, over coffee, through people who know people.
At our firm, we’ve learned that the best client calls are the quiet ones. Someone asking a question early, before signing, before building, before the problem exists. Those conversations take twenty minutes and save months. The difficult calls are the other kind, the ones that start with «I know I probably should have asked sooner.» We can almost always help. But the people who reach out early aren’t luckier. They just decided, from the start, to have their people in place.
So if you’ve recently made the move, or you’re about to, here’s the one thing to steal from the expats who make it look easy: build your bench now. Your accountant, your lawyer, your doctor, your handyman, your neighbor. Meet them before you need them. Ask the questions that feel premature. In a country that runs on relationships, that’s not caution. That’s how you actually arrive.
Diana Granados leads Strategic Development and Client Experience at GM Attorneys, a boutique law firm advising foreign investors and homeowners in Costa Rica’s coastal luxury market, with offices in Flamingo, Tamarindo, Nosara and San José. You can reach us at info@gmattorneyscr.com, and you’ll find additional resources and updates on our blog: https://gmattorneyscr.com/blog/.