Canadians shot in Puerto Vallarta?

Yes, that’s the headlines this morning across the Internet and I’m sure mainstream media, especially I’m sure, in Canada. This is still a breaking story, but here’s what some of what we know so far:

1. These two guys were from Kamloops, a town in the center of British Columbia Canada.

2. The Canadian RCMP have stated that these two are “persons of interest” for drug related activities in Canada.

3. One was carrying a gun. Having a gun in Mexico is like having one in Canada. If you have one its most likely because you are up to no good. Guns are difficult to get and not thought of as a means of protecting yourself if you are a regular law-abiding citizen.

4. Its been said they were involved in real estate in “Bahia de Banderas”? I deal with a lot of people in real estate development, and I’ve never heard or seen these guys before.

I think this is a case of two bad guys from Canada hanging out in Mexico because the heat was on to them back home and then got themselves involved on the wrong side of a drug transaction or they were moving into someone’s turf. And this can happen anywhere; Canada, USA or Mexico. Unfortunately, I don’t think its being portrayed that way so far in the media.

Will update as more information comes in…

UPDATE:

From the Ottawa Citizen:

VANCOUVER — Two B.C. men gunned down Sunday in the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta were involved in the drug trade, likely as “brokers” facilitating the shipment of cocaine to Canada, a police expert said Monday.

Sgt. Bill Whelan, of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), said investigators in B.C. were well aware that Gordon Douglas Kendall and Jeffrey Ronald Ivans were living in Mexico and had underworld connections.

The two former Kamloops residents were executed early Sunday in a targeted hit carried out by several well-armed men who fled in two vehicles.

Ivans also brandished a gun after the gunfire started, according to Mexican police, but did not get a shot off before taking several bullets to the head.

The gunmen pumped a second round of bullets into each of the Canadians as they lay on the ground, according to Mexican news reports.

Whelan said the names of both Kendall and Ivans had surfaced in an ongoing drug investigation in B.C., but Whelan is not linking them to a particular gang or criminal organization. “Obviously, if you are going to be in Mexico and be taken out by Mexican cartels, you are working at a high level and you are probably not doing that by yourself,” Whelan said. “We knew what they were up to. We knew they were in Mexico.”

As brokers, they would have been the men on the ground in Mexico for B.C. drug traffickers wanting to get Colombian cocaine, Whelan explained.

“Like any legitimate company, if you have got a product overseas that you want and you are importing it a lot, you would usually send a company member over there to ensure swift purchase and swift shipment of the product you want,” he said. “They have come up during a drug investigation. We can’t talk about that right now, as it is an ongoing investigation.”

The execution of the two appeared to be the “settling of a score,” a Mexican embassy press attache in Ottawa said Monday. “Nevertheless, the appropriate Mexican authorities are conducting an investigation to shed light on the case,” Alberto Lozano said. Ivans had a drug conviction in B.C.

VANCOUVER — Two B.C. men gunned down Sunday in the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta were involved in the drug trade, likely as “brokers” facilitating the shipment of cocaine to Canada, a police expert said Monday. Sgt. Bill Whelan, of the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU), said investigators in B.C. were well aware that Gordon Douglas Kendall and Jeffrey Ronald Ivans were living in Mexico and had underworld connections.

The two former Kamloops residents were executed early Sunday in a targeted hit carried out by several well-armed men who fled in two vehicles. Ivans also brandished a gun after the gunfire started, according to Mexican police, but did not get a shot off before taking several bullets to the head. The gunmen pumped a second round of bullets into each of the Canadians as they lay on the ground, according to Mexican news reports.

Whelan said the names of both Kendall and Ivans had surfaced in an ongoing drug investigation in B.C., but Whelan is not linking them to a particular gang or criminal organization. “Obviously, if you are going to be in Mexico and be taken out by Mexican cartels, you are working at a high level and you are probably not doing that by yourself,” Whelan said. “We knew what they were up to. We knew they were in Mexico.”

As brokers, they would have been the men on the ground in Mexico for B.C. drug traffickers wanting to get Colombian cocaine, Whelan explained. “Like any legitimate company, if you have got a product overseas that you want and you are importing it a lot, you would usually send a company member over there to ensure swift purchase and swift shipment of the product you want,” he said. “They have come up during a drug investigation. We can’t talk about that right now, as it is an ongoing investigation.”

The execution of the two appeared to be the “settling of a score,” a Mexican embassy press attache in Ottawa said Monday. “Nevertheless, the appropriate Mexican authorities are conducting an investigation to shed light on the case,” Alberto Lozano said. Ivans had a drug conviction in B.C.

Americans with a Mexican real estate trust take note

There’s no escaping the long arm reach of Uncle Sam! Rick Ashley, a CPA in the USA, recently wrote this article for the Vallarta Real Estate Guide. Americans that own real estate in Mexico should take note.

If you are a U.S. citizen who owns or has just purchased a property in Banderas Bay, Congratulations!; you own a piece of what many refer to a paradise. What you need to be aware of is that you may now have additional reporting requirements to the IRS. If the property is located within 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) from Mexico’s international borders or 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) from its coastline (commonly designated as the “restricted zone”), then, as a foreigner, you must own the property through a Mexican Residential Trust (MRT) or a fideicomiso.

For purposes of U.S. federal income tax law, a “trust” is defined to mean an arrangement by which title to property is held by a person or persons, with a fiduciary responsibility to conserve or protect the property for the benefit of another person or persons. A trust is an arrangement by which trustees take title to property for the purpose of protecting or conserving the property for the persons purchasing the property. A Mexican Residential Trust meets this definition as the real property is held in trust for the person or persons purchasing the real property by a Mexican Bank serving as the trustee. This means that you are the grantor or beneficiary of a foreign trust and required to file a Form 3520 in the year following the year you created the foreign trust.

There are other reportable events that require the filing of a Form 3520, but creation of the foreign trust is most common. This form is due to be filed by March 15th of the year following the creation of the foreign trust. Failure to file this report could result in the assessment of penalties for failure to file in amounts up 35% of the fair market value of the property transferred to the trust. Additionally, for each year that you are the grantor or beneficiary of a foreign trust, a form 3520A, must be filed with the IRS by the trustee of the foreign trust. This form 3520A reports the annual activity of the foreign trust. The trustee is to forward a copy of your statement from the 3520A so that you can report any reportable income on your tax returns.

Vallarta real estate interview with Chris Haines

Chris Haines of G3 real estate office in Vallarta was recently interviewed on the Mexico Real Estate Investment Blog:

It has been over thirty years since Chris Haines first stepped on the beautiful beaches of Puerto Vallarta, and now, three decades later he and his wife, Rita, call it home. Having lived in Acapulco as a child during its hay day and having visited many other beautiful areas within Mexico, Puerto Vallarta remains one of his favorite spots. So much that, Chris and Rita Haines purchased a beautiful condominium on the hillside of Concha Chinas area in Puerto Vallarta, with a spectacular view of the Banderas Bay. Chris is co-owner of G3MEX Group, a Real Estate Investment, Development and Broker company in Puerto Vallarta.

Check it out the whole interview here

Mexico Luxury Real Estate Symposium

Every year the following symposium takes place in Mexico City. I’ve attended and found it very rewarding, educational and a great way to network. This year should be especially interesting with all that is going on in the real estate industry. I highly recommend it.

Luxury Markets Symposium – Mexico, October 6th and 7th, Mexico City

Luxury Markets Symposium is the forum to learn about the current state of the luxury leisure real estate industry. The results, the changes we face and the newest trends which will drive our future. Luxury Markets Symposium is a unique forum in Latin America in which you can hear from international speakers, learn from their experience and discuss the options for growth and development for the industry.

Some of the opportunities to be discussed this year are:
• Mixed-use projects
• The Mega development experience
• Active Living (new and attractive wellness and lifestyle options for retirees).
• Marketing 360°. Communication and product positioning.
• Potential growth in the luxury segment of the leisure-oriented real-estate industry.

Widen your networking opportunities and generate growth for your business.

Luxury Markets Symposium will take place at: Club de Banqueros in Mexico City www.luxurymarketsymposium.com

Call them to register: +52 (55) 5005 6345 México City,
or email at registro@luxurymarketsymposium.com

Working out of this real estate downturn

The traditional way would be to get together realtors and developers, hopefully the tourism board participating, and create a marketing plan involving public relations and advertising, perhaps attend a few conventions and have a booth and tell people how wonderful it all is done here. But I don’t think the traditional way works as well anymore.

With the advent of the Internet and social networking, the consumer has been put in the forefront and in the driver’s seat. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes or fake your way through it – they will find out and they will tell their friends – virally. I can just see it, rolling out with a $200,000 USD campaign and then a development goes down, like the Trump Tower project did up near the border, and its all across all forms of media. $200,000 down the drain.

I think we need another approach, because we aren’t out of this yet. Everyone has been effected by this slowdown, some more than others. And the one’s that have been hurt the most, will have problems recovering and will mean a difficult road for those who have invested with them, unfortunately we will be hearing more about them in the news and on the blogs, than the one’s that are doing just fine and are taking care of the buyers and investors.

There’s a new mantra out there going round and being used by the media consultants and it goes something like this: “The complaint department is the new press release” or “The complaint department is the new marketing strategy”. Both are saying that if you just take care of your customers really well, the word will get out there, through websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking means.

So here’s my proposal.

The good old days…

I’m currently reading “The Worst Hard Time” by Thomas Egan, which is about the American Dust Bowl during the Depression. A good read, I especially liked this intro to the second chapter:

Hope died the first time people laid eyes on Boise City, Idaho. It was founded on fraud. Even the name itself was a lie. Boy-City, the promoter pronounced it, from the French words le bois – trees. Except that there was not a single tree in Boise City. Nor was there a city. But that didn’t stop the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company from selling lots, at forty-five dollars apiece, in a phantom town in the newly opened Panhandle of Oklahoma. The company sent fliers all over the country, showing a town as ripe as a peach two days into its blush. The brochures sketched a Boise City with elegantly aged trees lining the streets, a tower of cold, clean water gushing from an artesian well in the center of town, and houses any banker would be proud to call home. Three railroads were building lines to Boise City, the company said, and a fourth was on they way. You could grow cotton, corn, or wheat on rich land just outside the city limits. Hurry – sites are going fast. A fiction, all of it. But the story helped them sell three thousand town lots in 1908, one year after Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state.

When the lucky buyers showed up to see their share of the shining new city on the designated opening day, they were shocked. Women came in full-length white dresses and men in polished boots. If anyone from the development company had been around, the life would have been choked out of them by the best-dressed mob on the plains. On Boise City’s imaginary streets, the buyers found stakes in the ground and flags flapping in the wind. No railroads. No tracks. No plans for railroads. No fine houses. No businesses. The artesian well was a stockman’s crude tank next to a windmill, full of flies. Worst of all, the company did not even own the land it had sold.

Licensing for real estate agents in Mexico coming?

This article was recently posted regarding upcoming licensing and education for real estate agents in Mexico – something the national real estate board (AMPI), has been working hard to obtain for years.

A milestone and historic event occurred in Mexico real estate this August.  Recently, the AMPI association was able to implement a new degree in the Mexican universities and obtain the classification of a new professional license for Mexico Real Estate professionals.  The new university degree is being offered as an option in universities in response to the Mexican authority’s concerns that improved standards and better training should be required for real estate consultants and professionals in Mexico.  Fernando González Salazar, Director of the Professional License Department of AMPI pointed out, “The market and clients demand true professionals, specialists in real estate with recognized studies and a professional license authorized by a federal government body.”

The new professional title is officially authorized and administered by the SEP (Secretary of Public Education), and comes in response to the request from the consumer market.  The title is offered through a combination of a professionally applied exam of high security –  and the requisites of demonstrating ample experience in the industry.  Also, the title can be obtained from studying 4 years of courses at several universities selected throughout Mexico.

A follow-up phone call to Tere Kimball, president of the real estate association in Riviera Nayarit, confirmed that this is in fact in process.

A milestone and historic event occurred in Mexico real estate this August.  Recently, the AMPI association was able to implement a new degree in the Mexican universities and obtain the classification of a new professional license for Mexico Real Estate professionals.  The new university degree is being offered as an option in universities in response to the Mexican authority’s concerns that improved standards and better training should be required for real estate consultants and professionals in Mexico.  Fernando González Salazar, Director of the Professional License Department of AMPI pointed out, “The market and clients demand true professionals, specialists in real estate with recognized studies and a professional license authorized by a federal government body.”

The new professional title is officially authorized and administered by the SEP (Secretary of Public Education), and comes in response to the request from the consumer market.  The title is offered through a combination of a professionally applied exam of high security –  and the requisites of demonstrating ample experience in the industry.  Also, the title can be obtained from studying 4 years of courses at several universities selected throughout Mexico.

Best Mapping system for MLS: Microsoft or Google?

When we were choosing a mapping program for our MLS system, there were really just two to choose from; what Microsoft (referred to as “Bing Maps”), has to offer and what Google has. After looking over them both, we chose Google. We found that Microsoft, although a good system, has been slow to update their satellite images and their street maps.

We went back in this week and looked over what Microsoft has done lately, if there have been any updates, and we were disappointed. First we lookded for La Cruz de Huanacaxtle with Google (shown below, on the left). All the streets with names are shown, along with the marina. However, with Microsoft’s mapping system (on the right), La Cruz doesn’t exist; not streets, no marina. If you had a house for sale in La Cruz, how could you show where it is located with Microsoft?

The next set show part of Fluvial. With Google all the streets are labelled (on the left). With Microsoft there are no streets – Fluvial basically doesn’t exist (on the right). We then looked at it in Satellite view. Google is much clearer (left) and it really can zoom in. Microsoft’s images are not clear, they are older, and this is as far as it could zoom in (final image).

Why is this important? You want to choose a mapping system that is accurate for any MLS system. If streets aren’t shown, or images are old, this will make it difficult to show where properties are located, and to show what the region actually looked like.

Google also allows for Google Earth 3D images (where Banderas Bay, surrounded by mountains, shows very well), and most recently it has allowed for embedding images into the maps and offering 360º tours. For instance, you could embed an image of the Peninsula tower into the mapping system, and then be able to tour around it like you were flying around in a helicopter. Very cool. An example of where this is going has been done for Deck 12 (you’ll have to download or have Google Earth first to view it – which you should try out anyways.).

There are some very interesting things being done with mapping systems these days, and it seems Google is leading the race.

Changes to Real Estate Guide MLV property listings

To MLV Premium Members,

For many years we listed all MLV listings in the Vallarta Real Estate Guide. It was part of the Premium package where you get these listings (unlimited) and your office listed on our online directory at mlsvallarta.com. This worked fine when there were only 350 MLS listings and the Guide had more than 50 pages. Well, things changed. The MLS inventory shot up to over 1,100 listings last year and the Real Estate Guide fell to less than 40 pages. To include all the listings it would have taken up 12 pages!

So we decided to look at this a little closer. We noticed that 60% of the offices have less than 10 listings but that one office had over 100 listings. The system wasn’t fair. The larger office was paying something like  2.5 pesos for each property included. Using that figure, we were making less than 20 USD per page in the Real Estate Guide, when an advertising page costs $600 USD. It was clearly not sustainable . And, going to a layout like we now have, where photos aren’t included, isn’t fair either, nor does it look good. So we decided to make it more fair.

For the November issue we are going to allow offices to include 12 properties in the Real Estate Guide with the Premium plan. And, we are going to increase the size of the MLV ad by nearly double; increasing the photo size and the text size so it is easier to read. This way 2/3s of the offices will be able to include ALL their listings. You will be able to check off, in the Member’s Only section of MLSVallarta.com, which properties you want to list. Check off 12, and next issue they will appear. If you want to list more, there will be a small extra charge per property.

For Premium MLV members, we will also be listing your online office contact information in a much better way, including your logo, contact info, description of services offered and space for you to describe your business services. You will control this information, inside the Member’s Only portal. We are also adding icons for affiliations you may have, or awards you have won. You will be able to control this as well (just be honest about it, we’ll check!). This will be ready in November as well.

Google ramping up its real estate search service?

The following was recently posted by Joel Burslem at the blog “The Future of Real Estate Marketing“. With a number of public sites such as Trulia, Zillow, Realtor.com, etc. out there, I guess Google wants to be part of the game as well.

On the Google LatLong blog today, Google announced that they have rolled out vast improvements in the way that they display real estate searches in their index; they are now included by default in the Maps view. They have also rolled out brand new real estate specific landing page at maps.google.com/realestate. This move should come as no surprise to anyone following this space. Real estate search tools like Zillow and Trulia are seeing significant traffic growth and Google will only stay on the sidelines so long once they see someone else starting to monetize search results.

As mentioned up front, right now Google is only deploying these searches into its Maps results, so they are relatively confined. But I wonder how long before they display them in their Web results too (much like they do with their Local Business results – at the top of the organic results). If that’s the case, here’s where we may see the Mountain View giant start to siphon off traffic from the real estate specific search sites. Time will tell, but the game’s about to get interesting.

Public sites like Zillow and Trulia are one thing, but when Google gets in the game, its a whole new ballgame. They dominate every other market they are in, are their eyes now set on what has traditionally been a closed system controlled by real estate boards? As Joel says, its going to be interesting…