For Homeowners
We are not here to maximize your home’s profit. We are here to realize your version of what this home should be — and to tell you the truth along the way. This page explains how that works in practice, and just as plainly, when we’re not the right fit.
How We Think About Your Home
Most management conversations begin with a number — projected occupancy, projected income, a projection of you. Ours begins with a question: what do you want this home to be? Some owners live in their home six months a year and let us work with the months that remain. Some want four rentals a year — few, careful, and worth it. Some want a competitive calendar and a real occupancy target. These are all good answers. They are simply different homes, and they deserve different plans.
We are Ben and Shannon — husband and wife, and the founders of Pura Villas. We manage a small collection of private homes on Costa Rica’s Southern Pacific coast, with a local team, and separate books for every home. Small is not a stage we’re passing through; it is how the work stays personal. The plan we build for your home starts from your picture of it, not from a template.
The Four Questions
Before a home joins the collection, we ask four questions of it. Does the ocean reach it — a real view, not a glimpse? Can it host well — four bedrooms at least, and five is better? Is it truly private? And can its rental income sustain its own excellence?
The last question is the one that decides. We have learned where the math holds on this coast: a home of this size and setting earns enough from its rentals for its owner to keep reinvesting — the maintenance, the wear and tear, the small repairs that keep a house honest. That protection is what allows us to place a home in front of the most demanding travel partners we work with, and to stand behind every night we sell. It also protects you: a home that cannot fund its own care becomes a slow argument between the owner and the calendar.
When a home doesn’t fit these parameters, we say so early and kindly — and we’ll still point you toward people we trust who are a better match. It happens often, and it has never needed to be awkward.
If You’ve Just Bought a Home Here
The first year of owning a home on this coast teaches you things no inspection report covers — how the house breathes in the green season, what the road asks of a car, which corner the afternoon rain finds first. It is also the right year to decide, calmly, what role renting should play. Not every home should rent, and not every year is the year to start.
If you’re at this stage, the most useful thing is a conversation, not a contract. Walk us through the home and your picture of it — how much you’ll use it, who you imagine staying there, what you never want to happen to it. We’ll tell you honestly whether renting fits that picture yet, what it would take to be ready, and what the numbers on this coast actually look like for a home like yours. If the honest answer is “wait,” we’ll say wait.
If You’re Building, or Nearly Done
The last ten percent of construction decides the first hundred reviews. Most owners first write to us six months before a build ends, and that is the right window — the walls are where they will stay, no one is adding a bedroom, but the decisions that shape how a home hosts are still open. In our experience there are somewhere between fifty and a hundred of them, and almost none appear on an architect’s drawing.
A second stacked washer and dryer, so a ten-guest changeover doesn’t run past midnight. A garage that quietly wants to be another bedroom. Bed frames that accept trundles, so families fit comfortably and the calendar fills easier. Which blinds survive this climate, and which provider’s won’t last two seasons. The fabric outdoor cushions actually need here. The electric gate, the choice between keys and digital locks, the security setups that work on this coast and the ones that only look like they do. Small things, decided once, felt in every stay afterward — and none of them require touching a wall.
Then the unglamorous last stretch: furniture logistics inside Costa Rica, a freight forwarder in the United States for the pieces you want shipped, and the first full stocking of the home before its first guest. We help with all of it. If you’re inside this window, this is the most useful conversation we offer.
If Your Home Already Rents
Some of the homes we admire most on this coast are already looked after — often well, sometimes by people we know and respect. If yours is one of them, this page still belongs to you. You own this home once. It is fair to ask, every year or two, whether its numbers, its guests and its care still match what you imagined for it.
We’re glad to sit with a season’s results and go through them with you — with full disclosure, nothing held back for a later pitch — and tell you, plainly, what we see: what’s working, what we would do differently, and, just as honestly, when the answer is “your manager is doing right by you; change nothing.” We don’t speak badly of other companies, and we never ask an owner to burn a relationship to start one. Existing bookings are always honoured. A second opinion costs a conversation — it’s your home, and it should be treated that way.
If It Isn’t Working
And if what you’re living with is genuinely a bad experience — trust worn thin, numbers that never quite add up, the feeling that you’ve become the one managing the manager — our experience is that waiting rarely makes it better. Whichever direction turns out to be yours — pausing rentals, selling, taking the keys back into your own hands, or changing managers — every one of them begins the same way: by understanding, clearly, where things stand today. That first step is only a conversation, and it carries no obligation. We’re here to help you see clearly, whichever door you choose.
Two Ways of Working
Booking management. We take responsibility for everything between your home and its guests: enquiries and guest communication from first message to final review, the distribution strategy, and the calendar and rates — tended by hand, not by an algorithm alone. We work with more than thirty booking channels, worldwide and local — from the large platforms to the invitation-only villa agencies we’ve built relationships with over years. Each channel keeps its own standards and accepts homes on its own terms, so no two homes share the same map; part of our work is knowing which doors will open for yours, and presenting the home so they do. And booking management carries no geographic boundary: as long as the home has a truly capable local hand — someone who can look after all the moving parts of the property, day to day — we can carry everything else, wherever in Costa Rica it stands. There are no fixed fees and no onboarding charges: we earn a commission when a booking succeeds, and nothing when it doesn’t. We are paid the way you would want us to be motivated.
Full property management. For homes around Dominical, Dominicalito and Uvita, we also care for the home itself: the cleaning and maintenance teams, supplies, repairs, oversight between stays, and a clear monthly account of everything that came in and went out. Every home we manage has its own separate bank account — your money never pools with anyone else’s, and every colón and dollar is traceable to your home alone. And a boundary stated plainly, because boundaries are part of honesty: we are not lawyers or accountants, and we won’t pretend to be. We work alongside yours and give them clean, complete records.
Which one fits depends on your home, your team, and how involved you want to be. Owners with a housekeeper and caretaker they love often want booking management only; owners abroad usually want us to carry all of it. Both are full commitments on our side.
What We’ll Tell You, Honestly
There are a few conversations most management companies avoid. We’d rather have them on the first call. Some owners feel a fine home doesn’t belong on Airbnb — sometimes that instinct is right, and sometimes it quietly costs a home its best guests; the answer depends on the home, and we’ll show you why. Some owners arrive with a nightly rate in mind that the market research here doesn’t support — often because someone selling something once made the picture prettier than the coast really is. We’ll show you the actual numbers for comparable homes and let you decide with clear eyes.
Our promise is narrow and firm: we will never push you to do anything you don’t want to do with your home, and we guarantee you the best advice we have — drawn from years of bookings, reviews, and guest conversations on this specific stretch of coast. Your vision steers. Our experience keeps it grounded. When those two things meet, the home does well — and so does everyone who stays in it.
Talking With Us
There is no form to fill in. Write to Ben and Shannon directly at ben@puravillas.com or shannon@puravillas.com, or reach us on WhatsApp at +506 7046‑9007 or +506 8819‑6777 — one of us answers, usually the same day.
If your home is ready or already renting, send whatever exists: a listing link, photos, roughly how the last year went. If you’re still building, plans and a location pin are plenty. If you’ve just bought and are simply thinking out loud — that’s enough too. The first conversation is about your picture of the home. Everything else follows from that.