Hi, my name is Sean. Hi, I'm Summer. We're from Denver, Colorado, and we're the owners of the Casa Playa de Denver. So we've always been looking for a place to build a home to retire in. Throughout the years, we've been to most of the Hawaiian Islands, a lot of the Caribbean Islands, even Costa Rica. And when we came to Belize, we decided that this was definitely the place we wanted to build a house. So we just happened to drive into Mahogany Bay and stopped in the RE/MAX office because it's right in the front. It was about 5.30 in the evening and Ruben was still there. We just started talking to him about the property and he explained how everything worked.
And next thing you know, there were four families buying four lots in a row on Street 7 from Ruben. It was probably the best day of his life. We chose Belize because it's a short flight from Denver. There's a lot of flights. There's even a direct flight once a week. Costa Rica was just too hard to get to, and the prices were really going up. But we found that Belize was much more affordable. And also, we also felt the island was really safe. So our kids will be able to come here when they are in college, if they want to bring some friends down. We just kind of wanted it for our family. When we're driving around on our golf carts down the street, a lot of people wave and smile.
You know, they're obviously used to seeing tourists, but they're also not, you know, hostile or anything. They're very welcoming. The food sold us. Everybody in the group loved the food. It was just delicious. That was the kicker there. Yeah. That's the reason that we just decided let's do it. That was probably the biggest surprise on our first trip was how good the food was. and it continues to be and it's fun to come back and see like new restaurants open and also to try restaurants that you know we haven't had a chance to try yet so that's been a lot of fun.
So the agent we worked with was Ruben and he was great because he really explained to us exactly how the process works in terms of being able to purchase and own the land how we would you know go through the construction process and then how everything would work in terms of turning this into an investment property for short-term rentals. And now it's great when we come back to the island and, you know, we're driving around the property and we just, we drive by Ruben on a golf cart. And he'll always turn around and say hi to us and... Try to get us to go drinking with him. Yeah. Watch him sing, stuff like that. Which we want to. We really want to.
But we're definitely very comfortable recommending Ruben to people we know. You shouldn't hesitate because it's far away to build. Because our build team was very reliable. They would send us emails all the time. They sent us drone footage of our house being built. You know, they would contact us right away with questions for us. If we had questions, we could contact them. Everything was in-house. So nothing was scary at all. and everything turned out really beautifully. Yeah, I think I'm most impressed with the quality of the build. You know, even if there was a big storm, I think that our house will still be standing and it'll be here long after we're gone.
Just the attention to detail as well, you know, using a lot of local materials, like a lot of the wood is from the island or from Belize and it just, it came out really beautiful. We're very pleased with how the house turned out. I also think that you know you shouldn't be afraid of managing the property as far as it being an investment property from far away because the team on the ground here does unbelievable job every time we come back sometimes it's six or nine months before you know between visits and when we come back the place looks great it looks really well maintained it's cleaned you know any maintenance issues get resolved and taken care of right away whether we're here or not.
Sometimes we'll just we'll get a message that says hey you have a faucet leaking we took care of it that kind of thing. So really just the distance should not be something that that scares you whatsoever.
