We first met Riccardo Garcia in the fall of 2003. We took 6 months off and drove to Mexico and Belize to see where we might want to invest our money into a vacation home.

We decided on Cozumel, because of the people, the beautiful water and ease to snorkel off the shore!

We looked at some used homes that needed some renovations and that’s how we met Riccardo. He showed us a few and told us what would need to be done and estimated costs. We drove back home March 2004 and decided we just weren’t quite ready to invest in foreign property.

In 2005 we started looking again. Luckily for us a new construction condo project fell thru in April 2005. We continued looking on the internet and finally in July, 2005 we went onto Cedral’s website and saw a virtual drawing of a set of 5 homes that were to be built in the area of town that we were interested in buying. The price seemed reasonable and we started looking into the dimensions of the lots and picked the one that we figured would fit a small pool in the backyard. We emailed Riccardo and asked what we had to do to purchase Lot D. We also had him price out the pool and made some changes to the house design. He priced out the upgrades and emailed back to us quite quickly and we emailed back “YES” and wired a deposit. In September 2005 we flew down and met up with Riccardo and the Notary to sign all the documents. While we were there we also got to pick out our tiles for the floors and backsplash in the kitchen. The construction on our place started almost immediately with an estimated December 2005 possession date. Riccardo was good about sending us pictures of the progress! Then Hurricane Wilma hit and the construction came to a halt. Riccardo emailed that due to the storm our house would be delayed by about 2 months.

In mid February 2006 we flew down and took possession of our new home! Riccardo helped us with the final documents at the Notary. He helped us get all the utilities in our names, get the registration at the Municipal office, bank trust, etc…. Without his knowledge and excellent English this would have cost us a lot more money. We trusted him and took his advice on how to set everything up.

There are little things that we would have changed, if we would have been in Mexico during the build, but on the whole the whole experience went quite smoothly and we are still the happy owners!

We have stayed friends ever since and always try to get together when we are in Cozumel. He even came to Canada and stayed with us for a week!

In summary we found that working with Riccardo and Cedral Homes was a great experience and would gladly recommend him and his company to anyone considering investing in Mexico.