Country Article / Postcards

Boom Towns

Date: 01/31/2004

Dear International Living Reader,

We left Managua, where road crews and heavy equipment predominated the landscape (and where we'd just finished our Latin American Investment Symposium)... and flew this morning to Panama City, where, again, construction teams and cranes are the first things you notice. A new mega-shopping mall, in the works for the past 18 months, opened two weeks ago... new high-rise condo buildings, some in the luxury class, are opening at a rate of one every two or three months. The roads are jammed with SUV's and Mercedes.

"So there's a lot of money in Panama City?" asked a friend traveling with us, in the city for the first time.

Weeelll, we replied, yes... and no. People appear to be living well in part because you don't need a lot of money to live a very good life here.

You can have a full-time maid for $140 a month... a full-time gardener for $60 a month...

Five friends can enjoy a fine lunch in a trendy cafe for $27. (I know, because that's what our group of five paid for lunch at the ultra-contemporary Crepes & Waffle house. It was a lunch that would have cost us 60 bucks easy back home in Ireland.)

Cars, computers, cell phones, televisions, DVD players, palm pilots...all the toys of the 21st century are a bargain here. This is one of the world's largest trading posts, and the competition for your business, especially for electronics, is fierce.

It's easy to be spoiled in this place. One of our friends in Panama City has a full-time maid, a part-time gardener, a driver on call... he eats out three or four nights a week... goes to nightclubs with his friends... gallery openings in Casco Viejo... first-run movies, in English, for as little as $1.75 a ticket...

You can buy a condo in the city's premier high-rise, Vista Marina, a full-service building with a view of the harbor, for less than $400,000. That's for a 3,500- to 4,000-square-foot unit with top-of-the-line finishes... and three parking spaces. At the city's best address.

And you can finance the buy. Thirty-percent down.

We've finally invested in this market, not in a downtown condo, but in a 300-year-old building on the main square in the city's old colonial neighborhood, where we've watched the grand old buildings slowly turn over from local market rentals to galleries, cafes, and beautifully restored private residences.

We feared that if we waited much longer, we wouldn't be able to afford to buy in to a neighborhood that we're convinced is well on its way to becoming Panama's answer to South Beach, Florida.

We shared our Copa flight this morning from Nicaragua with eight International Living readers who had been in Managua with us for the conference. One already owns Panama real estate, a home in Boquete where he and his wife spend half the year. The others are here scouting. One is in the living room of our friend's house in La Cresta as I type. I can hear him discussing plans for a city real estate tour in the morning. Wish I had time to join them...

Kathleen Peddicord
Publisher, International Living

P.S. I'm taking the 15-minute late-afternoon flight later today out to Isla Contadora, where they've just finished filming a second "Survivor" series. The Pearl Island archipelago to which Contadora belongs was off the world's radar screen until the producers of "Survivor" discovered it and, in the past year, used it as the location for two seasons of episodes. What has all the fanfare meant for this tiny tropical island fringed with white sand? I could wager a guess... but am going to see for myself. Will report more later in the week.