For Sale
Buy and sell property in Guatemala.
An apartment in Zone 16 is often sold off-plan, while the tower is still a hole in the ground, and a multi-storey house in San Martín Sacatepéquez may have been built with money sent from the United States and now be shown by a relative who lives next door. Both sit alongside resale houses in gated communities, building lots on the edge of town, coffee and cattle farms in the countryside, and street-front shops, new from developers or second-hand from their owners. A good listing says up front how the price can be paid: cash, a bank loan, or the down payment in instalments.
Off-plan apartments, resale houses, lots and farms:
four different purchases, each on its own timetable. Apartments in the towers of Zone 15, Zone 16 and Cuatro Grados Norte are mostly sold off-plan: you reserve a unit from the drawings, pay the down payment in monthly instalments while the building goes up, and settle the rest on delivery, usually with a bank loan. Within a tower, floor and orientation move the price most, since higher units hear less of the street and west-facing ones take the full afternoon sun. A resale house is the opposite trade: you see exactly what you are getting, extensions included. Building lots are advertised around the cities, and in the countryside a coffee farm near Acatenango or grazing land in Petén is valued as much for its water as for its size. A well, a spring or a share of the mains water supply in the listing tells you where that water comes from. Shops and warehouses sell on street frontage and parking. Homes let by the month belong in property for rent, and somewhere to stay for a few nights in short-term and vacation rentals.
Down payment, mortgage or cash:
how you pay changes which property makes sense. A resale house in a gated community in Zone 18 or San José Pinula runs from about US$100,000 to US$170,000, while a new two-bedroom apartment in Zone 15 or 16 starts near US$200,000. Buying off-plan usually means a down payment of a tenth to a fifth of the price, spread over the build, and a lower price than the same unit will carry at delivery: the discount is what you are paid for the risk that the tower runs late. Lots are often priced in a traditional unit a little under three-quarters of a square metre, so convert before comparing one with a lot listed in metres. Many buyers of resale houses use an FHA-insured mortgage, and a valuer inspects the house before the loan is approved. Ask much more than that valuation will support and the buyer has to find the difference in cash.
A house with extensions, or a tower still a bare concrete shell:
each hides its risk somewhere different. In a used house, ask what was added later: a second level on a single-storey house, a room on the roof terrace, a garage turned into a shop. Rebar left sticking out of the roof for a future floor rusts; ask whether an engineer designed the house for the extra weight. Open the taps upstairs to check the pressure, and ask whether the street flooded in the last heavy downpour. With an off-plan unit, it is the developer you judge: visit a tower it has already delivered, get the delivery date and the list of finishes in writing, and confirm whether parking and a storage room are included. If anyone wants the down payment paid into a personal account rather than to the project’s company, walk away.
Selling a house in Huehuetenango to a buyer in Los Angeles:
often neither side is in the country. Many multi-storey houses in the western highlands were paid for with money earned in the United States, and the family interested in one is often abroad too. Film a slow walkthrough, room by room and the street outside, because for someone who cannot fly in that video is the viewing. Give the land area and the built area separately, what was built later, where the water comes from and whether the property is registered, which a buyer’s bank will ask before it lends. Say whether you accept a mortgage buyer or only cash. Whoever is sending the money from Los Angeles will usually ask a cousin to go and look, so leave a name and a time that works on a Saturday.