I am Trey Schmoker. Hi, I'm Brandy. So Brandy and I have been so fortunate to be. We traveled all over the world. We absolutely love to travel. We've traveled to many many many different countries and we really just wanted an island destination. Something that was going to be a Caribbean type of vibe if you will and an island destination and in our experience with Belize it just absolutely checked all the boxes and matched everything that we wanted to do. and wow it's worked out great and here we are.
My first time was in 2016 and we came to help out a school that's up on the mainland and near Belmapan and when we came we just fell in love with the just the culture and the people here and especially when we came to the island obviously it was just relaxing and it was you know it's just a great trip. So when I first started looking for property I came across the Will Mitchell channel and YouTube, and I started eating everything I could possibly get out of there, watching, reading more about it, listening to all the things he did, the interviews that he was actually doing at the time. It got me really interested in what's happening here in Belize.
And I just took the chance at one point and thought, you know what, I'm just gonna go ahead and send an email. And I shot it over to kind of second thought on a Friday afternoon. It was probably after three o'clock in the afternoon, not expecting anything else was going to come of that until maybe next week or that type of thing or at all. And I think maybe it was seven minutes, maybe, probably less than that. I get a telephone call from Chris Letellier, who was our agent. He immediately reached out and he and I just hit it off like super fast. He answered all of the questions and the things that we were asking. And I'll tell you, I was hammering a bunch of questions.
I already knew the answer to a lot of them because I'd already seen in the things that Will had said.
I was cross-checking, of you will because it can be a scary thing purchasing outside the states you know and taking that chance reaching out and pulling that risk chris answered everything in repetition to anything that i fired at him and was very honest with each of the things and we really got along very well at that point so if you're considering buying property in belize or anywhere i would encourage you to consider belize because of the amount of opportunity you know we bought this first started and bought this lot before we built the house or anything there was absolutely nothing on it, just a vision and a dream.
Went through the process, we bought this lot in 2021 and I can tell you that even if it's scary to send the money down, even if you're not real sure if everything's going to happen, it absolutely will because we're sitting in it and we absolutely love it. Was it different than building in the states? Yes, because in the states you can get on Amazon and have them deliver it to your door by 4 a.m. the next day. That doesn't work that way here. You're on an island, things have to get there. All you have to do is just learn the process and know to plan ahead or do the things that you need to do. Also, we're looking at more property here.
And the reason being, when we bought this in 2021, if I would have known or had my crystal ball working right, I should have shook it a little bit more. I would have bought three or four opportunities down here because the value has raised so much. I mean, since we've gotten this house or since we built it, it is worth more money than what we paid for it. And what else can you ask for than that? I mean, investment that you can hope for. I mean you you think you put into an investment and maybe it's gonna pay you back within you know umpteen or so many years or that type of thing or that you have an asset sitting somewhere that that's where the money's sitting.
Well this one we put into the investment the investment grew. Our asset grew faster than we could have grown it in any other avenue. We bought at the right time but there's not really a wrong time in Belize in my opinion. [Unclear at 03:53]
