MindSpring Founder Takes ‘New
Urbanist' Movement To Costa Rica
By Jim Tharpe, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
MindSpring founder Charles Brewer, a dot-com
guru turned “new urbanist” developer, has
been having Costa Rican dreams, with a
little bit of the Italian coast and Florida
Panhandle thrown in to keep things
interesting.
Brewer and a small group of partners have
purchased 1,200 hilly acres along the
northern Pacific coast of the Central
American nation where they plan to build a
new town -- Las Catalinas -- over the next
few decades. Think Seaside, Fla., (the
postcard-perfect Panhandle beach village
between Panama City and Destin) meets
Italy's Cinque Terre.
“It’s like Seaside programatically, the idea
of intentionally building a walkable town
along the beach,” Brewer told The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution during an interview at
his Ansley Park home. “But it won’t look
anything like Seaside. It’s much more like a
Mediterranean, pedestrian hillside town.”
The first half-dozen or so homes, including
Brewer’s own 8,000-square-foot retreat, are
now rising from an isolated peninsula that
overlooks a crescent-shaped beach lapped by
turquoise waters. Brewer’s company has just
begun marketing the next phase of the
project, which will be aimed at the buyers
of vacation homes with a taste for the
exotic and the bank accounts to afford it.
Initial home prices will range from about
$500,000 to $1 million.
Restaurants, small hotels and more townhomes
and houses will follow, said Brewer, who
envisions a town of 2,000 or so residences a
few decades or so down the road. The primary
market for Las Catalinas homes will be
part-time residents, Brewer said, but his
goal is to have a third or more full-timers.
More than 80 percent of the 1,200-acre site
will be left as a wild buffer, Brewer said,
with development taking place on about 18
percent of the total land area.
Brewer said if his company can sell 50
houses a year “that would be a rapid pace.”
At that rate it would take 40 years to
complete the town. But he added: “We will
not do that anytime soon.”
“It’s a very conservative, creep-out, not
leap-out model,” Brewer said. “If we go a
little slower, it’s OK. If we go a little
faster, that’s even better.”
The 51-year-old Brewer -- who made millions
a decade back when MindSpring merged with
EarthLink -- is no stranger to summoning
livable space from a blank slate. He created
Glenwood Park near East Atlanta on a 28-acre
brown-field site that has been transformed
into a mix of residential, retail and office
space.
That project has been a success from a
residential standpoint (it has won a wall
full of awards). However, the retail part of
the project has fallen short. By Brewer’s
own estimate, the retail property is only 60
percent occupied.
Brewer became a devotee of new urbanism --
communities where homes, work space and
retail coexist in an eco-friendly setting --
after he read “Suburban Nation” by Andres
Duany, the father of the mixed-use movement.
The high-tech entrepreneur -- he left the
Internet world just after the EarthLink
merger -- had also become consumed with the
idea of creating a hillside beach town. He
and his family had vacationed at Seaside
since 2002, and the concept behind that
award-winning community left a huge
impression on him.
“The experience for a family with children
of being in a place where it really is fun
to come out of your house and it’s pretty
and it’s safe -- it’s a profound experience
and so much better than a fancy hotel
experience,” Brewer said. He and his wife,
Ginny, have three children, ages 5, 9 and
10.
By 2004, Brewer had begun searching for a
large parcel of land where he could build
his own oceanfront town. He soon ran into
Bob Davey, a Realtor with 17 years of
experience in Costa Rica, who had the Las
Catalinas land under contract. Brewer also
partnered with Atlantan Tom Claugus, founder
of the GMT Capital hedge fund, Stuart Meddin
and Jim Berry.
“We have 25 or so total investors,” said
Brewer, noting that he and Claugus are the
most heavily invested. “Half are from
Atlanta.”
The group paid $26 million cash for the land
in 2006. Brewer, who emphasized frugality as
one of his core values when he ran
MindSpring, said the company will only build
residences after they are sold.
“I really don’t believe in having debt on
the land,” Brewer said. “It’s a
pay-as-you-go model, which may be the only
model that's really viable in the economy
right now.”
The recessionary economy has not been kind
to the vacation home market. Two years ago,
second-home prices dipped 30 percent or
more, though they recovered a bit last year.
“The market in Costa Rica has started to
pick up considerably,” said Chicago Realtor
Debbie Maue, the former National Association
of Realtors liaison to the country.
“Fortunately, Costa Rica doesn’t just rely
on the U.S. for buyers.”
Maue said she was unaware of any other
project like Brewer’s -- the creation of an
entire town -- in Costa Rica. But there is
plenty of resort-home development in the
Central American nation, she said, creating
a highly charged environment for Las
Catalinas.
“The stuff over $500,000 is a tough sell,”
she said. “You have to be pretty appealing,
and there is a lot of competition out there.
A number of projects have fallen through or
are on hold.”
Brewer said that even with the current
downturn, the Las Catalinas homes should
appeal to investors and second-home buyers.
Brewer and his partners plan to market the
town domestically and internationally. He
recently hosted about 100 potential buyers
at his Atlanta home. They sipped
ginger-laced margaritas and nibbled finger
food as Brewer waxed poetic over a
PowerPoint presentation about his new town.
One selling point: It’s only four hours by
air from Atlanta to the Liberia airport in
Costa Rica. Las Catalinas is about 30
minutes by car from that airport. Have
breakfast in Atlanta, lunch in Costa Rica,
Brewer tells his guests.
“The only way for a project like this to
succeed is to be so good people talk about
it,” he said later. “You can’t advertise
your way to success. You have to be really
good.”
The economic downturn, he said, has been
beneficial in some ways to the project in
that it permitted additional time for him
and his business partners to “get it right.”
“I really do think we can build one of the
most beautiful, enjoyable places that has
ever been built,” Brewer said. “I think we
can do something completely extraordinary.”
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