Growth!

Development of the beach here in Troncones is always a popular topic of discussion. Property prices and who is building what never go out of fashion. Anyway, I was curious, how much has Troncones *really* grown since we arrived in 1996 (October).

I can’t be completely accurate about the numbers in 1996, but the Troncones area was generally undeveloped back then. The “lot-ified” beach area is comprised of 300 lots spread over about 3 miles of beachfront. When we arrived in ’96 most of the development was to the south of the main beach entrance: all told about ¼ mile of beach and maybe 5 houses, one B&B, and a couple of restaurants. On the other side of the entrance, to the north, the development also covered about ¼ mile of beach and amounted to 2 B&B’s, a restaurant and a few houses.

In total at that time there were 3 places to stay, The Burro Burracho (where we stayed for a week), Casa Ki and La Casa de La Tortuga (where we also stayed for 5 weeks). These three places had 16 rooms between them. There were however already a few new places that were being built. We bought our property in ‘96 and started building in April 1997. By the time we finished our project there was another B&B opening at the same time, Casa Delfin Sonriente, we were the 4th or 5th place to open bringing the total rooms to 28.

Today, Jim and August and I went on a drive down the beach cataloging all of the development. We also tried to count the total number of rental units. We focused on the beach side first.

Total on the beach side of Troncones on June 11, 2005 there are:
98 buildings, of those 98, 61 are private homes, 12 are B&B’s, 3 are Small Hotels (Eden) and 10 are restaurants. 13 of the 98 are under construction now.

Of the 61 Private homes 27 are rental properties

On the opposite side of the road where there was nothing to speak of when we arrived there are 25 finished buildings and 8 buildings under construction.

The last number was a bit harder to come up with as some places I wasn’t sure exactly how many rooms they rented, and, does a big loft with lots of beds count as one room or two? Anyway, a close estimate is about 210 to 215 rooms to rent on the whole beach, including the village.

So in almost 9 years the rental numbers have gone from 16 to 215, that is a ~133% increase every year or 1340% over nine years. Excuse my math, it’s not perfect, but you get the general idea.

Whoa.