How Expats Actually Buy in Costa Rica.
45,000 conversations with people considering a move to Costa Rica, read and coded from their own words. When they buy, what they're afraid of, who's making the decision, and what it means for any business in Latin America selling to expats.
Most buyers are a year out when they first reach you.
When expats tell a business how far away their move is, the answers cluster around one year. Half say between four months and two years. Seven in ten say six months or more. The gap between a buyer's first message and their actual purchase is what we call the Expat Buying Runway, and for most of this sample it is long.
That year is not idle. It is spent watching videos, reading forums and asking friends — research a local business never sees. This fits a figure we've written about before: roughly 83% of the buying decision is made before a buyer ever contacts a business. By the time they message you, most of the thinking is done.
Buying timelines are getting shorter.
Looking month by month instead of at the whole period, the picture changes. From April to June, the typical buyer said their move was 12 months away. From July onward, 7 months. It has stayed there since.
Put plainly: people are arriving in a bigger hurry to move than they were six months ago. We can't say why from this data alone — the cost of living at home, politics, remote work becoming permanent, or some mix — but the shift is large and it has held for three months running.
For anyone selling to expats, that is a market signal. Follow-up built for a year-long decision is now too slow for a growing share of buyers who want to be done inside six months.
Buyer fears and objections, ranked.
Only one in five buyers ever said what they were worried about. The other four in five have the same worries — they just don't voice them to a business they don't know yet. That makes the ones who did speak up unusually valuable: they tell you what everyone else is thinking.
| Fear | Share |
|---|---|
| Cost of living higher than expected | 33% |
| Safety | 25% |
| Getting scammed / not knowing who to trust | 10% |
| Residency being difficult | 10% |
| Not being able to get financing | 10% |
| Political or legal uncertainty | 7% |
| Healthcare quality · distance from family · climate | 4–5% each |
Cost and safety are more than half of everything buyers worry about. But they don't worry about them equally: families put safety first; couples and solo movers put cost first. One "is Costa Rica safe?" article for everyone misses the group it matters most to.
The objection that stops a sale is usually one the buyer never said out loud. So the job is to answer it before they ask — in your content, your listings, your pages — rather than waiting for it to come up on a call.
- Publish real cost numbers. A third of all fears are about cost. Not "it's affordable" — actual grocery bills, rent by area, a real monthly budget for a real household.
- Make your safety content for families. They're the ones who need it. Everyone else is thinking about money.
- Put a guarantee where the doubt is. Reviews with names, prices in writing, a pledge on the listing. Trust fears rank fifth mostly because almost nobody answers them.
- Answer the money question up front. Financing — or whatever your version is: insurance, payment plans, deposits — comes up in about a third of conversations at every price level, and it is the question businesses answer worst.
One more thing worth doing early: ask when they're planning to move. Only a quarter of buyers volunteer it, but nearly all of them answer when asked, and it tells you how to handle everything that follows.
Who's buying: couples, families, and solo movers.
Of the buyers who said who they were moving with, 54% were couples, 26% families with children, 18% moving alone, and a few were groups of friends. Each of the three asks different questions and worries about different things.
| Group | Share | What stands out |
|---|---|---|
| Couples | 54% | Residency and work permits come up about 1.5× more often. Cost is their main worry — one in three of the fears couples named. Less likely than average to be asking about one specific listing. |
| Families | 26% | Schools, by a wide margin. Safety is their main worry. Ask "which area?" far more than anyone else (44% vs 27%). Least interested in specific listings. |
| Solo | 18% | Healthcare and pets, both many times above average. "Can I work or run a business there?" Most likely to want to rent before buying. |
Families are choosing a place to raise children. Solo movers are choosing a support system. Couples are working out whether they can legally stay. And with couples the majority, the person messaging you is usually not the only person deciding — the objection that ends the conversation often belongs to a partner you never hear from.
The bigger the budget, the faster they move.
The usual assumption is that bigger purchases mean longer decisions. In this data, the buyers with the most to spend were among the quickest, and the most likely to arrive already knowing exactly what they wanted.
| Budget | n | Typical timeline | What they're working out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bottom of the market | 56 | 6 months | "Can I afford this at all?" |
| Lower-middle | 105 | 10 months | Comparing options |
| Upper-middle | 77 | 12 months | Comparing options |
| Top of the market | 39 | 7 months | "Is that specific one available?" |
The two ends are fast for opposite reasons. Buyers at the bottom have one question — whether the numbers work — and once they do, they move. Buyers at the top already know they can afford it and have narrowed it down to one thing. It's the middle that takes the longest, because the middle is where the comparing happens.
How the money works comes up in about a third of conversations at every budget level. Here that means financing; for a car dealer it's the same question about auto loans, for a clinic it's insurance and payment plans. Whatever the category, the threads where a buyer asks about money are the threads most likely to end in a sale.
By the time an expat contacts a business in Costa Rica, they're ready to buy.
The findings above come from the research phase — the year before someone acts. A second dataset shows the other end: 30 months of records from a Costa Rica business selling physical goods to expats, matched against actual signed purchases.
30 months
message to signed purchase
six months
Of 127 buyers matched to their first contact, the typical one signed nine days after first getting in touch. Set next to the year-long research phase, the picture is clear: expats spend a year deciding in private, then contact a local business when they're ready to transact. The business at the end sees the last nine days of a twelve-month decision.
Where these numbers come from.
Over 45,000 conversations and 31 months of contact records from expat-facing businesses operating in Costa Rica, ending September 2026. Every conversation with a real prospect was read in full and coded individually; 1,554 of them were people genuinely considering a move, and every figure above comes from that group. Timelines are what buyers said themselves, checked against the original messages.
Businesses and individuals are not named as data sources, no message is quoted, and all results are aggregate. Figures for smaller groups — solo movers, the top budget band — are directional rather than precise.