Taking the Plunge

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Taking the Plunge
How a lucky real estate dabbler became an overseas landlord.

"But of course," he said when we'd asked, tentatively, if anything was for sale. "I can take you to see tomorrow."

House hunting by boat should be forbidden by the Realtor code of ethics. It's too much fun. Every house looks good when you coast up to its dock on a sunny morning. All the places we saw were pleasant -- in that setting, they'd have to be built without windows not to be. But the whole outing stayed safely at lark level for the first three stops.

Then we pulled up to a place called Pamakanya, a house on a little cove just outside the village of Jaibalito.

This time, no one said anything at all as we walked about the ground. Silently, as we turned corners onto one joyous view or architectural delight after another, all four grown-ups were coming to the same terrifying conclusion -- this might be too good to ignore.

It could only be called, well, a villa. It took me weeks to surrender to that word, which to me implies a lavish place on the Mediterranean where bronzed and topless sunbathers are draped like cats around an azure pool, and a bathrobe-wearing megalomaniac engages in arch banter with Mr. Bond. This place was too small for SMERSH headquarters, but what else do you call a walled waterfront compound that consists of a main house full of arched doorways, massive beams and indoor-and-outdoor fireplaces, a guesthouse, multiple cocktail decks, acres of riotous tropical gardens and a couple hundred yards of rock paths and stairs winding from the dock up to the mountain paths. It was a villa, all right. And it was for sale.

"I think we need to get out of here right now," said Jim, closely monitoring the glassy stare creeping into our eyes as we stood on a rock terrace looking over clouds of bougainvillea blooms. He was the skeptic among us, happy enough to indulge in some idle house hunting, but determined to quash the madness before any actual money changed hands.

But that was before he walked into the main bathroom, with tile mosaics on every wall and a toilet (this would be number eight for us, if you're keeping track) that faced a huge Captain Nemo window and a spectacular panoramic vista of the volcanoes. On all of Lake Atitlan, the seat with possibly the best view was a white American Standard with a 3.5-gallon flush capacity. This was a scene that any fellow could happily linger over during times of, uh, reflection.

"Clearly this house was designed by a man," said Katie.

Armand stepped forward with a soft smile, pulling out his cell phone. "Let me just call the owner . . ."

It had taken us about two hours to find a house that stunned us into helpless submission. It would take us two weeks, back home and working by e-mail and phone, to reach a deal with the owner, a friend of Armand's named John Pennington -- a Guatemalan architect with an English name but no English. Pennington, a well-known barfly and bon vivant around Panajachel, had been slowly building Pamakanya for more than 10 years. No one had ever lived there, but the architect had thrown some legendary parties on the property. He was willing to sell for $180,000.

We agreed with the Sebastians to go halvsies on the whole project. It was just doable if we begged, borrowed and refinanced with abandon. Not that any of us, down for a combined 16 years of college tuition just over the horizon, had cash to spare on slothful second homes. This house, like our other investment properties, would have to earn its keep. We were getting into the vacation rental business.

Those real estate seminars must include whole sessions on keeping emotions out of these things. The successful investor, no doubt, is an ice-eyed realist with no room on his spreadsheet for calculations of the heart. You run the numbers, weigh the risks, test the market. If it's going to make money, it's buy. If not, it's bye.

Us? We just really, really liked that house.

We had no idea how many renters we could expect. I could tell Guatemala was a comer on the international tourism scene, but who knew how many people would share our taste for out-of-the-way accommodations in a country still suffering widespread poverty and pockets of high crime?

Everyone reported sleeping badly in those early days, partly from excitement, partly from the string of acid-reflux moments that emerged as we prepared to wire a chunk of our assets down to people we barely knew.

It is, as it turns out, illegal for foreigners to own waterfront property in Guatemala. Armand said not to worry. "It is an old law," he said. It came out "Eeet eeeze zan old law" in his beguiling Grenoble accent. The regulation traditionally has had more to do with coastal defense than with lakeside properties.

We also would not get a deed to the land, or any of the other ironclad niceties that are such a comfort to American property owners and their nervous-Nellie bankers. The land would remain officially "owned" by the local village; we would get something called a "transferable right of possession." Land title reform is just beginning in Guatemala. Armand said not to worry. "Here it is normal," he said. "It is a small village. Everybody will know it is your property."

In any event, we would have to pay two-thirds of the cash purchase price before the house would be finished. John Pennington needed some capital to complete things like, oh, the water system and the half-built guesthouse. Armand said not to worry. "If he say he will finish, he will finish."

Finally, in a collective spasm of uncertainty at the very moment of hitting the button that would instantly and irrevocably flush our bank accounts into his, we asked Armand outright what was to keep him from bolting with the cash. "Nothing," he said. "You will just have to trust me. Here, that is how it is done."

We gulped, we swallowed, we closed our eyes and pictured that view from the bathroom, and we hit Send.

In the United States, a modern real estate transaction contains within it every transaction that ever went before -- and went wrong. Every lead-paint lawsuit, disputed deed and property-line catfight is reflected in the hours of certificates, waivers and addenda you are forced to sign at the closing table. There are dozens of them, culminating in the ultimate litigious absurdity, the form that pledges you to come back and sign any forms they may have forgotten to give you. The overwhelming emotion of new homeowners in America is writer's cramp.

Not so in Guatemala. The contract that indentured us to a tiny piece of Latin America came as a single Word attachment and was about four pages long, double-spaced. We couldn't read it, of course, but we ran it through a free Internet translation engine and assured ourselves that our names were spelled correctly. Otherwise, it remained gibberish. ("Both comparacientes declare, one after the other that in the terms briefed in this writing the obligations accept for himself that of the same one are derived.")

Armand got the cash and e-mailed a snapshot of John Pennington signing the deal in an abogado's office in Panajachel. Nothing about their smiling demeanor seemed to say, "So long, suckers!"

And almost immediately, Armand began sending updates, complete with digital photos, of Pennington's progress. The new water tank: done. The hand-carved guesthouse windows: done. The toilet in the guesthouse (number nine!): done.

A month before Pennington's deadline -- Jim and I reaped the first boondoggle. It was decided that someone needed to go down, show the flag and lay in a few necessities. We wanted the place to be renter-ready as soon as the sawdust settled. Armand met us at the airport in a hired van. On our way out of the capital, we stopped and bought a gas range, a microwave and two refrigerators. Then we drove them to the lake and, walking backward over a plank ramp, helped load them in a motorboat for the trip out to our house.

I'll never forget that first night at Pamakanya -- pain being so memorable. Pennington's caretaker didn't show up with the key, so we slept on the front patio on folded clothes from our baggage. I lay awake -- watching a little black scorpion climb slowly over the tiled floor and listening to the night noises of a country that still shows up on the occasional State Department advisory list -- and wondered what beach houses in Rehoboth were going for.

But it's a deep funk indeed that can survive a Atitlan sunrise. The morning brought a sheepish watchman, a key and our first showers in the Loo With a View. The house was even more beautiful than I remembered. Pennington was nearly done, and everything was obviously going to be ready for us to take possession on schedule.

Armand -- the Jeeves of Atitlan -- came by with his ever-ringing cell phone. We ordered beds to be built, closet shelves, a huge 10-foot dining table for the patio. We went to the excellent artisan markets in Panajachel for bedspreads, quilts and tablecloths, all in the exquisite Maya textiles that bring big bucks in Adams Morgan and Soho.

But our most important chore was hiring a staff. All the lakeside houses have a caretaker, called a guardian in the local argot, and these are coveted positions. (Not many jobs in rural Guatemala pay higher-than-market wages and come with benefits; among the applicants for Armand's last guardian post was the mayor of Santa Cruz.) Our leading candidate was one of Pennington's workers, a young man from the village named Andres Hernandez. We knew him to be a skilled carpenter, an enthusiastic gardener and very tolerant of our pre-K Spanish.

He was recently married, a new father and living with his family in his father's house. At the moment he accepted the job, the entire project changed for me. Whether this was a visionary investment strategy, a supreme self-indulgence or a wacky lark, it was now also a business, with a payroll and a young family's livelihood depending on it.

Andres started right away, but, inevitably, it took another year before the little economic cogs of Pamakanya began slowly to turn. Nowadays, I'm happy to report, we field several queries from renters a week. We have to turn away almost as many as we can accommodate, as just about every day of the high season (December through March) is booked. But for our first 12 months, all the money flowed the other way. We made half a dozen trips in various combinations, the gals one weekend, the guys another. We all spent spring break there together, and hosted more than 20 friends and family members during a long summer stint. Each time, like most other families in the Taca Airlines check-in line, we came wrangling a mountain of luggage: dishes, sheets, Ikea-crap, puzzles, board games, trash novels, all the accouterments of a vacation, um, villa.

The house quickly came to seem like our newest friend, a fun-loving uncle that we visit a couple of times a year. We talk often, and fondly, about its quirks and personality. The kids draw pictures of it. This scheme may never show up in a real estate seminar, but I'd like to propose a tenet for the sub-genre of vacation rentals: Invest in a place that you love yourself.

Our most important project in the run-up to financial solvency was, believe it or not, to add a third house. A studio bungalow, Armand said, would push us up to 13 beds, making the place more marketable for large groups. So last spring, on a flat stretch near the dock, where John Pennington had built a huge fiesta barbecue pit, a local crew put up a stone-and-stucco casita in the local style: red tile roof, a wide covered porch with massive beams ready for hammocks and baskets of blooming vines. We added an outdoor shower, a little kitchenette and a half-bath with a ceramic lavatory.

And, of course, a beige Kohler low-flow toilet.

And that makes 10.

Steve Hendrix is a writer for The Post's Travel section. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.