Panama Real Estate - Only Skin Deep?
(thepanamareport.com) The hype and puffery of Panama's real estate roar manifested itself last weekend at the City's annual Atlapa convention, an event which visitors will remember less for its investment insight and more for its plethora of beautiful women, free snacks, and complimentary mouse pads embossed with seductive floor plans.
If you haven't been to the Atlapa Convention Center in San Francisco, it's an elaborate collection of passageways, giant showrooms, and similar-looking doorways all of which could be inferred as a secret ploy meant to disorient convention goers into buying something spectacular. To add to the confusion were rows and rows of identical real estate projects (primarily located in the City) boasting the same graphic renderings we've become accustomed to identifying as Panama real estate (seeing as though a very small percentage of the market offers a tangible product).
Tall 3-D models of condo buildings reminded me of a time in my youth when I was addicted to the seemingly simple game Jenga, behind which was a surprisingly daring disposition that built to a suspenseful, high-spirited climax. I was never very good at Jenga, so instead reverted to coughing or burping to disrupt my opponent's flow.
Entrance to the convention was three dollars, the value of which could easily be consumed as free danishes, puff pastries, and baby goblets of Merlot. The amount of paper handouts were overwhelming, though some of the more creative developers used various gimmicks to draw clientele. There was a construction company for example, who attached all its representatives via rock climbing ropes to a pulley system situated on top of the booth. While some found the ropes to be innovative, I interpreted them simply as leashes: the owner's way of making sure none of his employees escaped before ten.
The floors of Atlapa were crawling with cleavage-laden promotional girls handing out free flyers, very few of whom had any idea about what they were representing. "So can you tell me a little bit about the financing for the two-bedroom condos?" I asked one particularly voluptuous vixen. "Beats me," she said, "my day job is at a strip club."
"That's where I remembered you from," I revealed. "But no, seriously, what are the terms of the financing?"
"No, seriously, I'm a stripper."
To be fair, a number of real estate booths saw great results from the convention, most of which was attended not by foreigners as expected but by Panamanians. Take the Bala Beach Resort project for example located on Panama's Caribbean coast, where well-informed representatives used valuable floor time to educate buyers not just about their development but social, economic, and political trends of the region as a whole. Or the Playa Blanca Resort where, if you wanted to, pretty girls could explain to you the implications of building a man-made lagoon.
The majority of Panama's real estate convention at Atlapa though was shamefully humdrum. To some, this beauty-is-only-skin-deep notion is actually quite representative of the country's real estate crisis as a whole, seeing as though much of the speculation surrounding the Republic of Panama's development explosion is just that, speculative. In many of the nation's ultra-boom regions, there is a very nervous feeling that maybe Panama's hype exceeds its true potential. Has the biggest real estate thrust in Central America gotten in over its head?
