I live in Roseville, California, and I can't afford a house here. The statewide median just hit a record $930,000. I ran those numbers for years and they never came out in my favor, so I started looking where they might.
That search ended up in Colombia, in something called pre-sale, or sobre planos ("over blueprints") in Spanish. A developer designs a building, opens a sales office, and sells the units before construction starts. You pick a floor plan, put down a small deposit, and pay installments while the building goes up. You lock today's price on an apartment that won't physically exist for about two years. When I first read that, I assumed it was either a scam or proof that I'd misunderstood how real estate works in different parts of the world.
It's neither. It's the default way Colombia builds housing. About 60% of new homes there sell this way, and the whole thing runs through a regulated trust, a fiducia, that holds your money so the developer can't touch it until the project clears a legal break-even threshold. There's a real legal machine behind it, built over decades. Most Americans have never heard about it at all.
Here's what I am not. I'm not a developer. I'm not a real estate agent. I've never bought a property in my life, and my Spanish is rusty high-school Spanish I'm rebuilding right now. I have nothing to sell you and no listing to push. If you came here looking for someone to put you into a deal, you're in the wrong place.
What I am is someone who got obsessed with one specific question: how does a regular American evaluate a Colombian pre-sale apartment before anyone tries to sell them one? I couldn't find a straight answer in English. The expat blogs are lifestyle. The YouTube channels focus on the famous Medellín. And yet the real mechanics sit in Spanish primary resources and developer contracts nobody has translated for buyers: how the fiducia protects your deposit and where it stops, what you're signing in a promesa de compraventa, and how you can legally get your money back out of the country.
So I'm going to learn it in the open and write down what I find. The good numbers and the ugly ones. The protections and the holes in them. When I get something wrong, I'll correct it in front of you, because a documented learning process is worth more than fake expertise, imo.
A practical reason this matters now: in Colombia, land, labor, and most materials are priced in pesos. Building a square meter runs somewhere in the low four figures in dollars, while the same units sell to foreign buyers at a multiple of that. The peso also rallied this year, which changes the math from what you'll read in older articles. My plan is to keep showing you the live numbers instead of telling you to trust a screenshot from 2022.
What this newsletter will cover over the coming weeks:
- The fiducia: what Colombia's pre-sale trust actually guarantees, and the one thing it pointedly does not (Issue #2, next week).
- The promesa de compraventa: the binding contract you sign before ground breaks, and the first clause you should actually read.
- Santa Marta: why I'm focused on this stretch of the Caribbean coast, the Pozos Colorados and Bello Horizonte corridors, while everyone writing in English is still parked in Medellín.
- The money mechanics: wiring dollars in, registering the capital so you can legally take it back out, and the currency risk nobody puts in the appreciation charts.
I picked Santa Marta on purpose. It's Colombia's oldest city, it just turned 500, and it has a glaciered mountain range rising straight out of the Caribbean sea behind it. It's also being built up fast and covered almost nowhere in English at the level that matters to a buyer. That gap is the whole reason I'm writing this newsletter.
If any of that is useful to you, subscribe and follow along, whether you're seriously shopping, idly curious, looking to invest, or interested in the development side like I am. One issue a week.
And reply to this one. Tell me where you actually are: dreaming, researching, or ready to wire money. I want to write toward the questions you have, not the ones I'm guessing at.
Next week: the fiducia, and why a Colombian developer legally can't start building until most of the units are already sold.
— Dmitriy