Web eases vacation home buying -- Page 2
By Holden
Lewis • Bankrate.com
"Folks like my parents would never, ever
consider purchasing property like this, ever," she says. "They're
of retirement age and would rely solely on a Realtor to find properties
and show them to them."
Paul Howarth, who works for a mortgage bank in Southern
California, did something that a lot of people might dream of doing,
but few actually do: He bought an acre in Fiji
after finding the lot online. He plans to build a house on it someday.
The land is on remote Koro Island. "It's a little
bit of an ordeal to get there," Howarth says. "I have
to fly into the capital and stay overnight and take a plane to an
island called Savusavu." From there, it's a two-hour boat ride
or a short flight in a plane.
It's a quiet place where homeowners collect water
that runs off their roofs, and where many people use solar power.
There aren't many cars, but quite a few wild horses. One expatriate
from San Francisco summons horses out of the jungle by whistling.
Howarth's lot is on a hillside, and when he eventually
builds on it, "any window you look out in the house is going
to see ocean."
He found the land after about an 18-month process
of trial and error. He researched land-buying in Mexico, Costa Rica,
Belize and other places. All of them presented problems. For example,
Costa Rica allows squatters to claim land after they have lived
on it without being kicked off. Eventually he discovered the benefits
of buying land in Fiji: Foreigners can buy land and own it outright,
there are no squatter's rights, and no property taxes.
He e-mailed attorneys in Fiji, e-mailed and talked
with the Fijian consul in Los Angeles, and on a Usenet newsgroup
(an online bulletin board) he found Americans who had bought property
in Fiji and could answer more questions. "It would have been
a tough thing to do without the Internet," he says. "I
don't think it would have happened without the Internet."
Howarth eventually felt comfortable enough to go
to Koro Island for a week. He elected to buy the hillside lot instead
of one on the beach. The cost: $22,000, about 90 percent financed
by the seller. That was about five years ago, and Howarth hasn't
been back since. But he plans to visit next February or March.
"I have old mango trees on the lot and
I'm going to plot out where I'm going to place the house,"
he says. He will plant mango and coconut trees around the home's
footprint, so that when he builds the house in about 10 years, it
will be surrounded by mature trees.
Even more than the Web, Howarth can thank e-mail
for making it possible to buy his one-acre slice of paradise. It
allowed him to communicate with people on the other side of the
world when it was convenient for both parties. That, says Saatchi,
the real estate agent on Long Island, is key: "E-mail has made
the time differences go away," she says. That's important when,
say, a buyer is traveling or living in Europe.
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