If you have ever wondered why the good Costa Rican hotels never seem to be for sale, this is the answer: they are for sale, and you are not supposed to know which ones.
An owner who advertises loses control of the story on the day of publication. Staff update their CVs. Guests wonder whether standards will slip. Suppliers reprice. Competitors call the same buyers you are calling and tell them a different version. And the price, which should be set by what the asset earns and what the land is worth, gets set instead by how long the listing has been up.
So the good ones move quietly. Here is how that actually works.
What blind marketing means in practice
The asset circulates under a code rather than a name. Buyers see the region, the scale, the type of business and the shape of the opportunity. They do not see the property name, the owners, the exact location or the ownership company, and nobody confirms any of it until a non-disclosure agreement is signed for that specific asset.
That last clause matters more than the rest. A blind document only stays blind if the advisor refuses to confirm, including to the persistent, the well connected and the ones who claim to have guessed. The document is the easy part. The discipline is the product.
Every enquiry is precalified, signed and registered in writing before anything opens. The practical effect for an owner is that the calls stop arriving on their personal phone, and the curious stop reaching the family with no filter in between.
The sequence
A confidentiality agreement, both ways. Before an owner shares anything, and before an advisor sees the books.
A mandate. Ours are non-exclusive, which means the owner keeps the freedom to sell to someone they find themselves. What the mandate buys is a registered process: every buyer the advisor introduces is recorded in writing, so nobody argues later about who brought whom.
A valuation, before a price. Land by the hectare against real comparables, buildings by the square metre and condition, the business by its results and its documented upside. A price without that behind it gets negotiated downward. A documented price gets defended. This is also where mixed household and business accounts get normalised, which on family owned properties is most of them.
Preparation. The blind teaser, the photography, the data room. This is the stage owners underestimate and the one that shortens everything afterwards.
The market, one buyer at a time. Not a broadcast. A short list of parties who already buy this kind of asset, approached individually, each under NDA before they receive anything of substance.
Negotiation to a letter of intent, then diligence, then closing, through escrow, with commissions and any holdbacks settled by irrevocable instruction on the day.
What the owner keeps control of
All of it. The advisor runs the process, the paper and the negotiation. The family decides who is admitted, what is disclosed and when, and whether to accept. In a confidential process the owner also keeps something they lose the moment they advertise: the ability to change their mind without anyone knowing they were ever in the market.
What to have ready before you start
Nothing on this list requires a decision to sell. All of it is worth having regardless, and having it is what separates a four month process from a fourteen month one.
Title. An estudio registral on every parcel. On older rural holdings this occasionally reveals that what exists is possession rather than registered title, which is far better discovered by you than by a buyer’s lawyer in week two.
Three years of accounts, plus an add-back schedule separating household costs from business costs where the family lives on site.
Monthly operating data. Occupancy, average daily rate and RevPAR by month. On a seasonal property, annual figures hide the entire question.
Corporate standing. Personeria, incorporation deed, municipal and tax certificates, social security standing. Cheap, quick, and their absence stalls a closing at the worst possible moment.
A payroll schedule with tenure, so the accrued severance is a number you present rather than a number a buyer discovers.
Why owners are moving now
A generation of Costa Rican hospitality was built by founders in the 1980s and 1990s who are now deciding what happens next, at the same time as international capital has developed a real appetite for exactly this kind of asset: small, distinctive, conservation linked, impossible to build from scratch.
Those two curves are crossing now. They will not cross forever.
Frequently asked
Does confidential mean slow? No. A blind process usually reaches a serious buyer faster than an advertised one, because the buyers are approached directly rather than waiting to be found.
How is the property described if it cannot be named? By region, scale, type and opportunity, under a permanent reference code. Enough for a real buyer to know whether it fits, not enough for anyone to identify it.
What if we already talked to a buyer ourselves? Say so at the outset and they are excluded from the mandate in writing. That is what a non-exclusive arrangement is for.
What does it cost to start? Nothing up front. The fee is a success fee at closing. Where a third party cost is genuinely needed, an appraisal or a registry search, it is agreed in writing beforehand and paid by the owner directly, with nothing added on top.
This is how CHN Hospitality Partners runs a sale. If you own a Costa Rican hospitality asset and want to understand what a confidential process would look like for you, write to tara@invest-costarica.com. There is no cost to the conversation.
