Borrow Against Your Arenal Property
GAP Equity Loans helps owners around La Fortuna and Lake Arenal prepare a lender-ready private loan request. Your property is what qualifies you — no credit check, no income verification, no bank.
Loans from US$50,000 and up. Interest-only payments, terms from 6 months to 3 years, up to 50% of the property value with around 30% or less preferred. Nothing to pay up front.
A tourism economy, and a lot of property that earns.
Arenal is the one part of this list where nobody is buying a view of the sea. They are buying a volcano, a lake and a climate that lets them sleep without air conditioning, and a steady stream of visitors who come for exactly the same reasons.
That gives the region something the quieter coasts do not have: a genuine year-round tourism economy. A lot of the property here is a lodge, cabinas or a restaurant rather than just a house, and a business with real trading history is something a lender can work with.
Values are lower than the coast, which usually means the loan amount is the thing to get right. The property still has to support the request.
Location helps a file. It does not approve it. The loan amount, the title, the use of funds, the documents and the repayment plan still have to make sense.
The the Northern Zone areas private lenders focus on.
- La Fortuna
- Arenal
If your property is elsewhere in the region, send the details anyway. Every file is reviewed case by case.
Homes and tourism businesses are reviewed differently.
Homes and land
- Clean title and the plano catastrado
- Access and the condition of the road in, which matters in a very wet region
- Water and electricity, and how reliable they are
- Anything near the lakeshore, which is a managed reservoir with limits on what sits close to it
- Municipal taxes paid up to date
Lodges, cabinas and restaurants
- Occupancy and trading history, not photographs of the rooms
- Whether the business and the property are held in the same name
- Permits and operating licences in order
- Staff and supplier obligations that come with the business
- A repayment plan that matches how the season actually runs
If the property is held in a company.
A great deal of Costa Rica property, especially foreign-owned property, sits inside an S.A. or an S.R.L. That is not a problem for a property-backed loan. GAP arranges loans against corporate-held property regularly.
What the file needs is the corporate side in order: the company documents, a clear picture of who owns the shares, the corporation tax paid up to date, and someone with the authority to sign on the company’s behalf.
One warning worth hearing before you restructure anything. Holding property in a company can suit a loan and suit your estate planning, and still work against you somewhere else. If you are planning to use that same property to apply for residency under the investor category, immigration looks at ownership differently, and a company is generally not the way you want it held. Talk to CRIE before you move a property into or out of a company, not after.
The things that stall Northern Zone requests.
A business with no numbers
If the property trades, the trading is the point. Occupancy, revenue and a year or two of history make the file. Without them it is just a building in the rain.
Lakeshore assumptions
Arenal is a managed reservoir, not a private lake. What can sit close to the water is limited, and a buyer or a lender will ask.
A price set years ago
The region has properties that have been for sale a long time at numbers set when the market looked different. The loan is sized against today.
Send the property and the amount you need.
That is enough to begin. GAP will tell you what the file still needs, organise the property, title, equity, use of funds and repayment plan into something a private lender can review, and be straight with you about whether the number works.
There is nothing to pay up front. Once the complete file is in and due diligence is finished, qualified loans can close within 10 business days.