The Buying Process
Financing
Property Protection
With respect to financing there one key issue that can arise, a fraudulent property transfer. This is when a seller holds your property out to be theirs in a real estate transaction. The consequences of a faulty purchase can result in loosing the real estate and thousands of dollars in legal fees. There are two good ways to avoid this problem.
Freezing the title is a simple way of ensuring that this will not occur. To do this, you file a request to the National Registry for them to freeze your title. This will disallow any recording or filing of transfer documents against your property by the employees of the National Registry. Once you are ready to sell, you file to release the freeze and the real estate can again be transacted.
Having a lien on your property is another great way to discourage scam artists from targeting your property. Most commonly, this is done with a bank mortgage. This is done by the owner of the real estate having their public notary request that the mortgage bond be issued against the title of the property for its full value or an amount you choose. The National Registry will annotate this on the property's files and will send the mortgage bonds to the property owner. This method is deployed between Costa Rican real estate owners and their lenders so that property title-holders can assure the certificate bonds as cash or present them as a guarantee on other loans. Once the loan is completely paid off, the lender returns the bonds to the property owner who can keep on reusing them in the same way.
Due to the fact that bonds are considered a major encumbrance on your property, it makes you an extremely undesirable target for those who would intend to depose you of your property. This is a certified legal tool to used to protect your real estate assets. Creating mortgage bonds on the property costs roughly the same amount as a normal mortgage. About 1.3% of the property value is paid to the state and to your notary when creating this type of mortgage bond.
