This was the appraisal of nearly 1000 hectares (over 2000 acres) of beachfront land, my third appraisal in Nayarit. There were many red flags to cause me to be suspicious:
1. The borrowing entity was a company in Cyprus, a country known as a hotbed of offshore shell companies (2267 identified so far by ICIJ). Shell companies are notorious for straw officers and directors and untraceability. Think of Cyprus as another Cayman Islands.
2. The borrowing entity had no history and no web site.
3. The borrowing entity did not own the land but had a JVA (joint venture agreement) with the landowner, a Mexican national.
4. The principal of the Cypriot company consistently misspelled his own name throughout the JVA.
5. All the bank account information of the Cypriot company had the company name misspelled.
6. As with Mexican land scams I’ve uncovered, the borrower’s representatives extolled the development possibilities for the land, but their credentials were not as real estate developers, but as marketing or public relations consultants.
7. No credible development plan was presented, but I was told that there was an agreement with the “Canadian Retirement Association” to build thousands of vacation homes for Canadian retirees. I have been unsuccessful in verifying the existence of the Canadian Retirement Association.
8. The Toronto phone number I was given for the Canadian Retirement Association connected me to a man who seemed to be more fluent in Spanish than in English and who bragged about his 75 “advertising awards”. This is not the talk of someone who would be trusted to manage a Canadian pension fund.
9. Similar to the Mexican land scams I’ve seen, I never got to meet the actual property owner, but I was given a document that assigned the right to mortgage his land to one of the borrower’s representatives. As I learned today at the ACFE Fraud Conference in San Antonio, identity fraud is a growing problem in Mexico as it is here in the USA, so I have to be careful.
10. As with Mexican land scams I’ve seen, my request for a current predial (property tax bill) instead yielded a predial from 2008, raising the possibility that the property has diminished in value since then or even the possibility that there was no affiliation with present owner such that a current predial could be provided.
Having been collecting listing data on this part of Nayarit for the last two and a half years, I noticed that asking prices on beach land in this area have declined up to 60%. Regardless of the suspicions I had about the loan request, the appraised value fell short of what was needed, any way.
Land loans are an ideal conduit for fraud in Mexico, by the way, because the value is so hard to determine, accurate information is so hard to come by, and it is easy to hire a Mexican appraiser to appraise the land for $100 million.
4 comments:
Thanks for another great post Vernon. Your due diligence inspires appraisers everywhere, at least this one. Keep it up and stay away from the cartels.
Sorry about that comment above. My daughter had logged into my ipad. It was really from me. Still, her avatar is way cooler.
Hi Vernon. Great Blog, I found it through a link on Appraisers Forum.
I've owned a home in Sayulita, Nayarit for the past few years and found the real estate transfer process quite interesting. The property within the town is mostly regularized and documented but I can only imagine what you come across in more secluded areas.
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