Andrea Díaz was born in Costa Rica’s capital of San José and moved to the Pacific coast when she was 18 years old, drawn by the waves. She’s spent her adult life in sunny Playa Negra, famous for black-sand beaches—and surfers.
The roaring right-hand barrel waves made the beach irresistible for Díaz. She didn’t start surfing until she was 16, but she caught on fast as a former competitive swimmer. Díaz became Costa Rica's first female surfing national champion in 1999 and won the title again in 2015 and 2016.
Twenty years ago, Díaz took up teaching surf lessons to tourists with dreams of catching waves themselves.
“I love my country,” she said, “and I love introducing tourists, foreigners to my country, my style, my way."
Over the decades, Díaz began to see outside business interests marketing surf lessons, launching restaurants and opening ecotourism hotels.
“My people are leaving and expats coming in,” she said.
She saw the system working against her and realized she had to play the game herself. Six months ago, she became a real estate agent. Partly, she said, she’s getting too old for the surf industry.
But more importantly, she got into real estate because she felt she must.
Díaz now sells and rents luxury properties to the foreigners forcing her people out of the coast.
She describes it as playing “the game.”
“I have to be more aggressive and become my own hero,” she said.
The 49-year-old Tica, as locals are called, appreciates what nature-based tourism has done for the nation’s economy as much as anyone. But like other natives, she has become frustrated “to see all the foreigners making the big bucks, making the money,” she said, as “Costa Ricans are just standing by and watching them sell our country.”
This nuanced relationship locals have with tourists is a paradox: It can be hard to live with them. But with tourism and foreign investment now the dominant economic activity in Costa Rica, it’s impossible to live without them.
“One of the reasons we've come to thrive is because of this mix and exchange of expats and people who come with money,” Díaz said. “If it was only Costa Ricans in charge of running Costa Rica, the development would not have come.”
Tourism has been growing in Costa Rica since the 1980s as the country worked to conserve its environment and market the resulting splendor. People travel from around the world to see the cloud forests, crystal-blue water beaches and more than 500,000 wild animal species.
Humans, most from North America, also were drawn to these pristine habitats, first for eco-vacations, but increasingly, to relocate. Many invest in tourism themselves. Costa Rica had 34,360 Airbnb listings as of May 2024, an increase of 21,795 (173%) since May 2018. Foreign direct investment in accommodation and food service activities reached $1.579 billion USD in 2022, a 35% increase from three years prior.
The 2020 COVID pandemic revealed Costa Rica’s dependence on tourism, with “devastating economic consequences” as Javier Pacheco, president of the Costa Rican Chamber of Hotels put it. Once travel bans were over, the government looked for ways to bring back visitors.
The Digital Nomad Visa was born. It allowed visitors to extend a three-month visa to a full year, with an option to renew for an additional year. A requirement for this visa is earning a minimum of $3,000 USD a month from outside Costa Rica.
Other policies, too, make it easier for foreigners and non-citizens to buy property. Anyone can buy land through fee simple or corporate ownership or through concession properties. Foreigners have rights equal to locals, which means someone can own real estate without having a partner living in the country.
“From 2020 moving forward, pricing has been insane,” Díaz said. “Rentals have gone double, maybe more.”
In 2025, the average national price for homes increased to $1,021 per square meter, up from $877 a square meter just two years before. Prices vary by area, according to Costa Rica’s National University Observatory of Tourism, Migrations, and Sustainable Development of the Chorotega Region, as the cost of land and property in Guanacaste has increased up to 300% since 2020.
Rising prices have made it harder for locals to stay in places they have lived in for generations. Renting can be impossible given prices tied to the income of foreigners rather than locals.
Yury Alvarez, a Tamarindo native, said some places run for $1,000 a month, which is unaffordable for locals who don’t often make that much income.
The average monthly household income per capita was ₡440 221, or $875.08, as of July 2024.
“We're not getting an income like many foreigners who come here and live their pura vida dream,” she said.
Alvarez has lived on the coast her whole life. She owns a babysitting company and surf school to support herself and her 10-year-old son.
“This is a problem because everyone is marketing to foreigners,” she said, “but no one is considering renting out to a Tico!”
It wasn’t until recently that locals began to speak out against the injustice they were experiencing, Alvarez said.
“Gentrification. We never heard this word before until a year ago, and the problem has been happening for over 10 years,” she said. “Imagine how blind we were.”
But locals also want to get in on the profit. One of Díaz’s neighbors commissioned her to rent out their property. The place is a one-bedroom residence in the middle of nowhere, and Díaz said it should run for $500.
Her neighbor wanted $900 a month.
“I've been promoting it for a month almost, no bites,” she said. The property’s profile caters to locals, according to Díaz, not an expat or tourist. You can’t ask for the same price someone in the middle of a tourist city like Tamarindo would ask for, she said.
“You need to understand that Costa Ricans are rich in land, but not rich in capital,” she said. “So, for a Costa Rican to own a hundred thousand hectares is nothing when they cannot develop their land or go beyond growing crops and agriculture and cattle.”
For some people, the easiest way out is selling the land, she said, but too many Ticos sold it without knowing its worth.
Real estate reality
To get a sense of the real estate trends, watch a little reality TV. Shows glamorizing the pura vida lifestyle include “Betting on Paradise” and “Living Overseas: Costa Rica.”
“Living Overseas: Costa Rica” is a video series that spotlights beautiful locations and shows how to live or retire in Costa Rica.“Betting on Paradise” follows a couple from HGTV transforming “a shabby Costa Rican motel into a luxurious tropical oasis.”
The shows paint a picture of luxury real estate tucked away in exotic towns where local culture is rich and people are friendly. They paint pictures of bohemian beach living that can be yours as you settle in cozy towns surrounded by jungles and inhabited with kind locals and other expats.
You can see how challenging it becomes for Ticos to enter the game.
International real estate offices like Keller Williams, Coldwell Banker and GoDutch Realty have a heavy presence in Costa Rica.
Many real estate agents are foreigners who don’t speak fluent Spanish, Díaz said.
One of them is Cathy Nicholas, a real estate agent at Lake Arenal who moved to Costa Rica from New York roughly 30 years ago.
While she does speak some Spanish, Nicholas said she mostly sells to foreigners because she’s not comfortable in the language.
“Ticos have their own market,” she said. “I don’t want to interfere.”
Lake Arenal is a quieter area close to Arenal Volcano in north-central Costa Rica, far from the coast, but even here, “For Sale” signs are often in English and expats are moving in.
“It’s a little oasis in the middle of Costa Rica,” Nicholas said. “Not overrun yet, put it that way.”
But the prices are rising, even in the heart of Costa Rica.
“In the past 10 years, houses are getting bigger and look more like the U.S.” she said.
Gated communities sprawl around Guanacaste and the outskirts of San Jose. Relocation agents specialize in helping expatriates move to Costa Rica. After COVID, the digital nomad visa and other property laws aimed to attract investment and development.
That’s what the country got. But according to Fernanda Mora, an international human rights attorney, it was more than many Ticos bargained for as foreign investment and newcomers flooded the coast.
“The government created that public policy," she said. “If you're getting the opportunity, of course you're going to take it."
Investment in the public services needed to keep up with development lags behind. Some communities face water stress and lack proper infrastructure and resources like hospitals, she said. “The development has been growing, and the population apparently has been growing too without a plan,” Mora said.
She is a cofounder of Anti-Gentrification Costa Rica, a civil society collective with the goal of creating solutions including more regulation in real estate.
Locals get displaced when they can’t afford the price for rent in areas that market to wealthier tourists. There’s also a widespread problem of high rates of unoccupied homes. Owners can get so much more from tourists than locals that they market to vacationers rather than permanent renters.
Locals jumped into the Airbnb market by building additional units on their land and renting them out. Tourists can sleep in a fairy light treehouse for $99 a night, or go glamping in a dome overlooking mountains.
Airbnb did not agree to an interview for this story. In a prepared statement, the San Francisco-based company said Costa Rican travelers represented 40% of bookings in the country in 2024.
The company also reported that 94% of Airbnb hosts in Costa Rica are residents, and almost 95% of hosts in Costa Rica own between one and three listings. It said this shows that Costa Rica’s Airbnb community is mostly made up of individual hosts and small-scale entrepreneurs rather than large-scale investors.
Locals like Alvarez and Díaz said they observe many of those residents are foreigners, especially on the coast. Díaz also said outsiders take advantage of maritime zone laws meant to protect Ticos by co-owning a property with a local. Foreigners cannot own more than 49% of so-called concession properties in the maritime zone, but according to Díaz, they can create an enterprise and name their lawyer as the shareholder, and themselves as the smaller shareholder.
“So, legal terms, yes, a Costa Rican owns it, but when you really dig, it's owned by a foreigner,” she said. “So, it's that gray area.”
Another loophole is known as border runs.
Tourists are allowed to stay in Costa Rica for only three months. But by doing a “border run,” they can leave the country for just a few hours, then come back and get another 90 days.
Facebook groups market services for taking tourists to Nicaragua or Panama for a border run so foreigners can renew their visas after leaving the country for at least an hour.
The practice might come to an end soon. Costa Rican legislator Priscilla Vindas Salazar presented a bill in February that would require tourists to stay out of the country for 90 days before reentering. The bill will also fine tourists who remain in the country illegally to $300 per month.
The bill states that visa runs have “significant impact on coastal communities and other high-traffic tourist areas, where the influence of foreigners combined with the demand for goods and services increases pressure on local resources, raises demand for temporary rentals and properties and drives up real estate prices.”
Díaz said one of her closest friends is an American “perpetual tourist” who does border runs every 90 days. Despite their friendship, Díaz said she supports the proposed legislation.
Even though “it hurts the ones we love,” she said, “the rules are the rules. They have to be followed, and they have to be applied because then the system itself is not sustainable anymore.”
The need for change
The real estate game in Costa Rica is complex and nuanced: It’s important for generating income yet unfair to increasing numbers of Ticos. At the very least, locals say, it needs a better set of rules.
“Our people are hurting,” Alvarez said.
She said the solution is for the government to prohibit foreigners from buying land to make it more affordable for locals.
Irene Chen of the Monteverde Institute, a non-profit dedicated to adapting and sharing sustainable practices, said communities can also organize local programs that move more tourism dollars to Ticos. One is "homestays" where tourists stay with a local family and pay them directly, rather than through international companies such as Airbnb. Homestays, traditionally arranged for college students, can appeal to tourists who want to immerse themselves in local culture and community.
On the national level, Anti-Gentrification Costa Rica has a petition with demands for government action.
They include: Ensuring non-discriminatory and equal access to adequate housing; requiring real estate agents to be Costa Rican by birth or by naturalization; enforcing existing environmental protections; and criminalizing “Ecocide,” such as land-grabs and illegal logging, now subject to civil penalties.
Díaz and Alvarez both support much tighter government regulation; for example, they see real estate practiced without licenses on the coast.
“Now, any person will come and within a week they are in the real estate industry without a license,” Alvarez said.
“It's like the wild, wild west,” Díaz said. “A lot of people end up getting ripped off.”
Learning to play the game
Díaz said she believes that education for Ticos, including ensuring everyone knows the value of their land so they and their families can operate businesses and turn a fair profit, may be more important than any other solution.
“At the end of the day, you are your only hero,” said Díaz, who now travels to real estate conferences to educate herself.
She also invested in real estate of her own so that her kids have a chance to build houses when the time comes. She wants to make sure they know how to play the game.
