Ben Inglis said that when he was hunting for a vacation home two years ago, he wasn’t looking for just a retreat away from Boston’s rat race. The 51-year-old mutual fund executive said he wanted a home where he felt like he could unwind entirely from city life.
“My criteria were essentially: a place with no phone, no loud neighbors, no cold weather,” said Inglis.
In 2005, while on holiday in Belize, Inglis visited some properties with a broker, but their search concentrated on waterfront properties near established resorts. For several days, he considered making an offer on a 20-acre spread. He decided against it, he said, when he came upon a group of Scandinavian tourists riding horses across his would-be beach.
Then, snorkeling near a reef adjacent to a private island, Inglis spotted what he was looking for. Using a rented seaplane and a motorboat, and accompanied by a broker from Coldwell Banker, Inglis visited about a half-dozen private islands. At the end of his 10-day holiday, he’d put in an offer of around $1.5 million on a five-acre private island about 20 minutes’ flight from Belmopan, Belize’s capital. The island features a dock, a long sandy beach and a 1,400-square-foot, single-story home.
“When I’m down there, my secretary knows to only give out the number of my satellite phone in extreme emergencies,” Inglis said.
Buying vacation homes around the Caribbean and Central America is a relatively straightforward procedure and a consistently popular option for Americans. Many locales, like the Virgin Islands, Costa Rica and the Bahamas, have in the past decade added thousands of units of both condos and timeshare properties targeted explicitly at wealthy North Americans.
But for those like Inglis, for whom a traditional second home in a different hemisphere isn’t secluded enough, there exists a vibrant market in the region for private islands.
About 1,000 private islands are sold around the world each year, according to Private Islands, a Toronto-based boutique real estate firm. No figures exist on the total value of transactions; although many of the islands for sale are listed for above $1 million, brokers say that sellers seldom get their asking price. Depending on the location of the island and how long it has been on the market, owners routinely accept bids 20 to 30 percent less than the listed price, brokers said.
“Islands can take a very long time to sell, and they take a lot of work to develop,” noted Alexis Pappas, director of operations for Private Islands. “Prices sometimes are within reach of middle-class buyers, but it takes a very driven and entrepreneurial person to make an island liveable.”
The liveliest real estate market for private islands is for properties on the coasts of Australia or Canada. The lakes dotting northern Ontario, where Hollywood celebrities like Steven Spielberg have second homes, are also busy with sales.
Conversely, the Caribbean and the waters around Central America abound with islands, yet brokers say that each year, fewer than a hundred come on the market. While those all offer isolated beaches and tropical forests, they vary considerably in size, amenities and development potential.
“Ever since Pablo Escobar used a runway on his private island to smuggle drugs to Florida, ownership and development rules in the Bahamas for islands over five acres have become much stricter,” said Pappas. “In Belize and Panama, there are hardly any restrictions at all.”
In general, brokers said, Caribbean and Central American islands for sale are small, usually a reef ranging in size from 1 to 15 acres. Larger islands can be found in the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands.
The largest islands presently for sale are two undeveloped islands in the U.S. Virgin Islands: Great Hans Lollik and Little Hans Lollik, which combined measure 611 acres, or just under one square mile. The larger island, which contains 511 acres, is for sale by itself for $33.7 million. The smaller island can be purchased for about $11.2 million. Both are listed with Private Islands, and presently, neither has any residents.
Descriptions of the islands read like notes of an explorer discovering some tropical paradise. The islands contain numerous white sandy beaches, palm forests and verdant valleys and are said to be untouched. “One of the few undeveloped tropical islands left in the world,” gushes the advertising copy.
The islands are zoned for anything from a single residential compound to a resort of up to 150 residences with a heliport. A third of Great Hans Lollik is reserved as an environmentally protected area.
More popular with American buyers are small islands in the Bahamas, Belize, Costa Rica and Panama. Prices vary depending on factors like size, proximity to cities, potential exposure to hurricanes, topography and what kind of buildings are on the island, yet brokers say appraising the price of an island is tricky.
“Accessibility is a big thing, and in the Bahamas, many buyers want islands where they can put in an airstrip,” said Alex Alexiou, a broker for luxury properties with Lowes Real Estate in the Bahamas. “We get a lot of celebrities looking for total seclusion.”
Stars who are said to have recently bought private islands include Leonardo DiCaprio in Belize, and Nicolas Cage, Sean Connery, Johnny Depp, Michael Jordan and Shakira in the Bahamas.