How to Find Properties in Puerto Rico | Easy Walkthrough
In this video, I'm going to show you how to navigate the clasificados online portal so that you could find a potential rental, or an actual investment property or property for yourself to live in.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
Are you looking to find properties in Puerto Rico, whether you're an investor or you're looking to change up your lifestyle and go live in Puerto Rico for the first time. In this video, I'm going to show you how to navigate the clasificados online portal so that you could find a potential rental, or an actual investment property or property for yourself to live in. My name is Ariel Herrera with analytics erielle channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. My passion is to be able to show real estate solutions in a very simple manner and also bring in data analytics. In the second video for this, I'm going to show you how to actually web scrape this page. If you want to learn more than please subscribe to this channel as well like this video if you want to see more content like it. Alright, let's get started. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to find properties in Puerto Rico. But first, let's just go through why you would want to invest in Puerto Rico and why you want to live there as well. I'm going to walk through for reasons of why you might want to invest in Puerto Rico. First, real estate prices have plummeted in recent years. In 2019, the country filed for bankruptcy due to serious debt crisis, making it one of the largest bankruptcy filings in US history. Thus, prices fell. So now may be a good time to snag a deal, especially that we see a large shift of people moving from northern states to southern states. And eventually now that everything is even more digital and before due to the pandemic we may see even more shifts to live abroad. Reason number two tax incentives. As of 2012, Puerto Rico introduced a series of tax loopholes to learn investors and businesses. These tax incentives make living and working in Puerto Rico and enticing prospect. And under the Act 20 qualified businesses are taxed a flat 4% as opposed to 39%. And soon to be 20% rate businesses in the US are taxed. So that's a huge saving 4% 39%. As well eligible companies enjoy 100% exemption on property taxes, you can even take it a step further by making sure you reside on the island for a minimum of 183 days per year. And if you're an individual with Puerto Rican residency, then your personal tax rate is 0%. Reason number three, opportunity zone investing. So Puerto Rico has a goal to drive much needed investments into housing, small businesses and infrastructure and an economically depressed area. The creation of the opportunity zones allows us investors to defer all capital gains for eight years. If the profits are reinvested and held in an opportunity zone, which at this time, most of all, Puerto Rico is labeled as opportunity zones. So you could really mix and match your investments throughout Reason number four, Airbnb market competition, hotel prices in Puerto Rico remain relatively expensive. And the availability for Airbnb rentals are scars. So for that investors have an untapped market to be able to invest in vacation rental properties. And it doesn't just have to be for a weekend stays or one week states. Think about it for digital nomads, those who are graduating for the next couple years, they've seen the shift of a lot of people now working abroad. And they may want to do that and force their employers to allow them to work anywhere. So in that case, they may want to stay in a property for three months, six months. And if you're able to accommodate for various types of short term rentals, you could have American professionals living in your property for a long period of time and have stable income. Next, why would you want to live in Puerto Rico?
So for one, it's friendly for digital nomads, as we say to taxes could be a lot less you're getting more in your pocket. This is really beneficial especially for those that are freelancers, as well there is availability of high speed internet and co working spaces second generous taxation system, and third tropical weather year round. This is one of the big reasons why I left the Northeast was because I didn't see the reason to scale back my lifestyle nine months out of the year, when I can enjoy it all year round living in Florida with less taxes and more investment opportunities for networking. Puerto Rico has very similar benefits as well. And taking flights to go back up to states in the Northeast or traveling back to the US is fairly easy in Puerto Rico. There's a lot of flights that come out of it. Lastly, embrace yourself and a new culture. Are you seeking a shift in your lifestyle, but you're unsure of going fully abroad to Europe for a year or two South America will Puerto Rico is the next best thing because as it is US territory, and there's a very large expat community, so it's highly regarded as a great place to choose to live. Now let's dive into where you find these properties. Right now I'm on the clasificados online page. Think of this as a Craigslist. So people can come here to buy and sell goods, including real estate, automobiles, pets, merchandise jobs, which is all listed at the top here. When you come onto this page, if you're on Google, you can translate this by clicking this button here, and translate to English we could see here now on the left hand side we have for sale and for rent. So if we wanted to die first at for sale, let's imagine that we're thinking of either buying a property for investment or to live in, we could see here that we have different areas and towns we could select. And if you're new to understanding Puerto Rico and its cities, you could look at Google Maps. And you'd see Puerto Rico has several major cities, such as Ponce, as well as San Juan. And you could see that it's relatively close to the US. Let's imagine that we want to focus in on San Juan, since it has a very large airport and already has a big basis for vacation rentals. Now if we go back to the site, we can use the drop down, and we can select Puerto Rico, San Juan. So if we go here, select all the towns in San Juan,
then we could dive deeper into looking only at houses only at apartments, we could also price what our maximum and minimum prices are, as well as the exact number of bedrooms we'd like. In this case, I'm just going to see the list right now, this brings us to a page where we could see some advertised listings up top first. And then we could see the ones that actually met our criteria down below. And total there are 1600 properties within this area that met our criteria. And on the right hand side, we could view each of these on the map as well, we could see that there are several properties right by the top of San Juan, and somewhere closer to the universities and other areas, we can further select on the type of property on the left hand side. In this case, let's just select one of the listings here. So I'm going to select the second one, we have one single photo, we do have the address as well as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Just as a reminder, if you want to translate this to English, you could do so just by using Google and clicking it quickly. And you could see that we also have the price as well. And we have more information on who the property is managed by who we would like to call if we want to get more information that makes sure that when you are calling realtors, you're also screening them making sure that they're legitimate, you're checking them out on their socials as well like social media, such as Instagram, Facebook, or on their websites. Now if we go back, there's a lot more that we can look at. But I'm going to show you in the next video how we can actually web scrape this information for free. So let's just go to the last part here, which is looking at short term rentals. Here we could look at short term rentals and select different criteria, we have long term rent long term lease, and then we have short term for holidays and vacations. So let's look at long term, we can also again select the location of what we want to look at. So I'm going to select San Juan, and there's 500 rentals here. This page can help if you're looking to stay in Puerto Rico long term. Also it can help from the investment perspective if you want to see what the current rental rates are going for and if you purchase a property, how much it's going to cashflow in the next video, we'll be able to consolidate this into an Excel file so that we could see the median rent rate and that will help us calculate cash flow. I hope this high level analysis has been useful. This is my first time diving into data that's not strictly the US and if you'd like me to dive more into international real estate then please let me know in the comments below with what country you'd like me to look more into. And if you have any existing data tips, please do share as well. If you haven't already, please subscribe. Thanks