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Newest Additions
unique house on the golf course
$389,000
Exciting oportunity!
$189,000
54 HA of Mountain property with Ocean Views for Sale in Caldera
$540,000
Building lot for sale in Altos del Maria with House Plans Included
$92,500
Beach front Condo in Coronado Bay for Sale
$210,000
5 parcels of titled land, 3 of which are Caribbean Beach front with approximately 4.5 km of beach frontage, ideal for land banking or development
$9,000,000
23 HA of Highland Property with River
$690,000
84 HA Farm with good road, electricity, with trees for lumber, oranges, coffee and Vanilla Bean Orchids
$420,000
lot in Coronado
$79,000
Beachfront Lot in Chiriqui; House Plans included in the Sale
$229,000
new short term rental in founders, playa blanca
$285,000
Lot for Sale with Construction for House Started
$169,000
Fully Furnished Ocean View Condo for sale, just meters from the Beach
$157,000
Andromeda Ocean estates communty on the shores of Azuero Peninsula
$75,000
Executive apartment in El Cangrejo
$0
Land for sale in Cerro Azul, great for development
$237,600
Luxury Condo with enviable ocean views in Punta Paitilla
$529,000
Home Ready to Occupy for sale in Altos Del Maria
$211,940
Penthouse Apartment in Amador Hill Building at excellent price per m2
$626,250
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Should I pay the Developer if my unit is not ready?
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By Carlos Neuman - Panama Relocation Attorneys
This is a common question we get from clients all the time. The answer will depend on how the contract reads. In most cases contracts will have the following clause (or something similar):
The balance due on the sale price of The Unit, for the sum of ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND U.S. DOLLARS AND 00/100 (US$ 100,000.00) to be paid to the PROMISSORY SELLER’S by wire transfer, irrevocable letter of payment or certified check from a bank accepted by the PROMISSORY SELLER no later than thirty (30) calendar days as of the date of issuance of the occupancy permit.
If your contract reads as the above mentioned clause, then legally you will have to pay them if the occupancy permit has been issued. The document presented is an official legally binding even if the Unit is not ready. Your obligation to pay is clear, and if you decide to withhold or delay payment until the apartment is completed the contract will most likely have penalties - ranging from interest payments to the cancellation of the contract.
We always advise our clients to make final payment once the obligation in the contract triggering the required payment has been fulfilled. Doing this will lead to perfect compliance of the agreement and in case there are defects with the apartment you will have the option to legally enforce the Developer to fix said mistakes.
Please note that from the moment of delivery of the Unit, the Developer has one year in order to repair any defect that the Unit presents. Our advice here is that before you receive the unit, prepare a Punch list of all things that need to be repaired or changed. That document, will serve as proof that you have requested the developer to amend any defects. The document should bear a receipt from the Developer with the date in which it was received.
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A Plan to Unlock Prosperity
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By The Economist
Ten years ago this month Panama took possession of the canal that bears its name. It has high hopes for a $5.25 billion expansion of the waterway
CAPTAIN HARIDAS PILLAY looks down anxiously from the bridge. He brings his ship through here every month, but it is always a tense, careful manoeuvre. The MV Perseus Leader inches into the Miraflores lock on the Panama Canal on her way from the Pacific Ocean to the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic, 80km (50 miles) away, a tug astern braking her bulky progress into the narrow gap. She is like a floating multi-storey car park, a roll-on roll-off car carrier. Today she has 3,300 Subarus and Mazdas from Tokyo and Hiroshima, bound for Baltimore and New York.
The master relays orders from the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) pilot to the helmsman as the vessel eases into the lock under her own power. With barely half a metre to spare to both port and starboard, she is roped to four “mules”, or electric locomotives, fore and aft to stop her bumping against the sides. “It’s like directing a small orchestra,” says Captain Pillay. Gates close, water rises, gates open; then close, up, open again. After about 30 minutes the ship is ready to steam into the wider waters of the canal. The atmosphere on the bridge relaxes, and cups of coffee appear.
The Panamanian isthmus was too high and rocky for the original French and later American builders to clear a sea-level passage like the Suez Canal, so ships have to be lifted 26 metres (85 feet) from the Pacific to enter the lake midway through the canal, and lowered again on the Atlantic side. The French gave up after tropical diseases, chiefly yellow fever, wiped out thousands of labourers. The American Army Corps of Engineers managed to control the spread of disease among contract labourers, of whom almost 20,000 came from Barbados; they built a railway, imported giant steam shovels and moved mountains to complete an engineering wonder of the world. The first ships passed through in 1914. The descendants of many workers live today on the Atlantic coast in cities such as Colón and still speak English.
As well as providing a short cut for battleships, the canal became a vital artery of world trade. Since the 1970s, however, merchant vessels have been growing too big to pass through it. The largest container ships today can carry more than 12,000 boxes, whereas the biggest that can fit in the canal carry only 4,500. Since the mid-1990s it has become obvious that the bottleneck would need to be cleared, or the canal would become a backwater.
In September 2007, even as the world economy slid into recession and global trade fell for the first time in a quarter of a century, the ACP started digging. The work consists mainly of dredging the existing canal and blasting an access channel to a new set of larger locks. The channel will be parallel to the existing Miraflores lake, but nine metres higher. Basalt from the excavation will be used to make concrete to build the locks. Construction of these, in what is now a marshy lagoon on the Pacific side, should start in a few months. About 150m cubic metres will be excavated, compared with 200m for the original canal.
Last July the ACP awarded the contract to build the locks: 60% wider and 40% longer, they will be able to handle all but eight of the world’s container vessels, along with supersize tankers and bulk carriers of ores and grains. An international consortium led by Spain’s Sacyr Vallehermoso won the contract, thanks partly to its innovative rolling lock gates which slide into a side chamber, allowing easier maintenance on the most delicate part of the locks. This is a trophy deal for Sacyr, and relief from problems in its home market.
The whole project should be finished in 2014 at a cost of $5.25 billion, more than a fifth of Panama’s GDP last year. Of this, $3 billion will come from retained earnings, the rest from bilateral and multilateral lenders, led by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, the European Investment Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. According to the ACP, the project is on time and within budget.
The expansion—one of the world’s biggest transport projects—was controversial when first mooted in around 2001. Some feared that it would cripple a small country whose public debt then amounted to 71% of GDP, and that extra dams would flood rural land, displacing peasants and threatening water supplies. Others argued for a giant port on the Pacific side with containers crossing the isthmus by rail. Yet Panamanians voted heavily in favour of expansion in a referendum in 2006 after concessions to soften the environmental impact: there will be no extra dam and the new locks will recycle most water.
Panama took over the canal ten years ago this month under a treaty signed in 1977 by Jimmy Carter, then America’s president. The Americans ran it as a federal agency, setting tolls to cover costs. The Panamanians’ approach was more commercial. The ACP, a state-owned autonomous agency, segmented the market, adapted tolls to different cargoes and charged more for additional services, such as extra tugs and deckhands. Transit times became shorter and more predictable, attracting container lines. In 1995, 200,000 containers went through; this year’s number is 4.6m. The canal’s share of traffic between East Asia and America’s East Coast has risen from 11% to 40%, according to Alberto Alemán Zubieta, the ACP’s chief executive.
The ACP has also been able to charge more. Since 1998 the average toll has risen by 70%. In May, for example, the price per container went up from $63 to $72. (Container ships are usually charged by capacity, regardless of load. Cruise liners pay $120 per berth.) The canal has revenues of $2 billion and costs of only $600m. Spare cash goes into the Panamanian treasury, through a revenue royalty and dividends. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the treasury pocketed $760m.
Improved service is one justification for the increased tolls. Joe Reeder, the last chairman of the canal authority under American control, thinks the Panamanians have done a great job. “They have got the total transit time down below 24 hours,” he says. “We never managed better than 27 or 28 hours.” This has been done even as the number of transits has risen from 13,000 a year to over 14,000. Most are done by a hard core of 300 container ships and specialised vessels like Captain Pillay’s passing through regularly between America’s East Coast and China.
Although it has some power in the market, the ACP is no monopolist, able to hold the world’s shipping lines to ransom. Rodolfo Sabonge, its head of marketing, notes that there are alternatives to the short cut between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The big market for container ships is East Asia (largely China) to the East Coast, with access to the bulk of America’s population. Shanghai to New York via the Panama Canal works out at roughly 25-26 days, compared with 27-28 days via Suez or 19-21 via Los Angeles and train. The route via the West Coast and overland costs about $600 per container more than Panama, depending on a ship’s operating costs, which are of the order of $60,000 a day.
The bosses of the world’s shipping firms, who sit on the ACP’s advisory board, started pressing for expansion as soon as Panama took over. “Hardly anybody is building smaller container ships now,” says Jürgen Harling, group vice-president of A.P. Moller-Maersk of Denmark, the world’s biggest container-shipping line. “With big vessels you need fewer of them, say, five to run a regular service from China to [America’s] West Coast, compared with eight or nine to run a similar service through the canal at its present size.” Laurent Falguière, a vice-president of France’s CMA CGM, the world’s third-largest container-shipping line, emphasises the flexibility a wider canal will provide, along with the upgraded ports and terminals planned on America’s Gulf and East Coasts. He says the project will “bring a breath of fresh air”, altering the relative merits of the different transpacific or Atlantic routes.
Not all shipping analysts are enthusiastic. Martin Stopford, a director of Clarksons, a London shipping consultancy, and author of a standard work on maritime economics, sees some limits to the benefits, since economies of scale diminish for container ships above 6,500 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units—the measure for containers). He also notes that East Coast ports are not yet big or deep enough to handle giant container vessels. “Nevertheless,” he says, echoing “Field of Dreams”, a film about baseball, “if they build it, they will come.”
Mark Page of Drewry, another London firm of shipping consultants, turns Mr Stopford’s argument on its head. “If they don’t build,” he says, “they will go.” Mr Page thinks the canal would have faced marginalisation had it not started expanding. In 2000, he calculates, 85% of the container fleet could still pass through Panama. But bigger ships caught on fast from the mid-1990s. By 2007 barely 57% of container ships could fit the canal. “By 2011 it will be less than half.” He thinks, though, that the expansion will not make much difference for many kinds of trades, such as bulk ores and grains, oil tankers or specialised refrigerator or chemical carrier ships. “It’s all about containers,” he concludes.
The ACP forecasts that, thanks to the expansion, total tonnage will rise from 280m tonnes in 2005 (its base year) to 510m in 2025. Container traffic should triple to about 300m tonnes. The ACP is also counting on a continued rise in its share of traffic between East Asia and the East Coast to about half, at the expense of America’s West Coast ports and railways. No fewer than 140 shipping routes (counted port-to-port) already run via Panama: the ability to take bigger vessels could add even more, especially between eastern South America and Asia, and western South America and the American East Coast and Europe. Brazilian soya and iron ore and Colombian coal in big bulk carriers may soon have better access to China, which might in turn affect commodity prices.
Mr Alemán also reckons expansion boosts Panama’s status as a regional hub: “It is a big port on two oceans,” he says. He sees more big ships coming in to offload cargoes for trans-shipment in smaller vessels on either ocean—an example of the flexibility that shipping lines want. Dell and HP, two big computer-makers, and Caterpillar, a leading manufacturer of construction machinery, already have distribution centres in Panama in anticipation.
[ read more ]
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L&RP inaugurates first Panama Pacifico buildings
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London & Regional Panama (L&RP), the master developer of Panama Pacifico in the former Howard Air Force Base opposite the capital on the Panama Canal, has inaugurated and turned over the first buildings in one of the seven areas which make up this master-planned, multi-use, new community.
The new buildings are “flex warehouses”, with a cost of $64 million, and were finished in record time by a team of over 700 Panamanian workers and consultants. Just over a year ago, L&RP celebrated the ground-breaking ceremony of the project and today they have completed 21,000 square meters of construction and have set construction records with the infrastructure base that has been set in the former military zone.
The new buildings have filled up quickly, to an 85% occupancy level. Some six companies are beginning operations in the “flex warehouses” already, among them the Spanish company Yermont Enterprises and the Finnish company Wartsila.
“The innovative concept of divisible warehouses offers companies the flexibility to distribute their space more efficiently and to the needs of their business,” said L&RP General Manager Henry Kardonski, “Today, we can all appreciate how the Panama Pacifico project is bringing new standards of quality to Panama as well as the region, there is no project like this. These standards are what reign and will reign in Panama Pacifico.”
Companies continue to show interest in establishing their regional and global operating headquarters in Panama Pacifico, not just for the high standards of construction and operation, but also because of the benefits provided through law, establishing the area as a special economic zone and providing a optimized processing of visas for members of upper management moving to the country.
Dr. Miguel A. Clare, Administrator of the Agency of the Special Economic Area of Panama Pacifico (AAEEPP) noted, “We should feel proud as Panamanians because this is the first public/private project in Latin America of this magnitude”. Dr. Clare added that agreements have been signed with several companies from a variety of industries including hi-tech, logistics, maritime, hotels, financial services, restaurants and educational institutions.
The next step at Panama Pacifico will be the inauguration of the first buildings at the International Business Park and the much-awaited pre-sale of the first residential community at the Town Center, as well as the first two buildings of the logistics park, called the PanAmerica Coprorate Center, custom-fit to the needs of 3PL Panamericana and OSALA, two large companies backed with Venezuelan capital.
For more information about Panama Pacifico, please send an email to info@panamarealtor.com.
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