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Not For Sale
At the North-Eastern tip of the North Sound of Grand Cayman is the popular vacation home area of Cayman Kai. It has been a property hotspot for decades, with many curious visitors interested in buying properties.
Many of the homes on the most prime beachfront spots are quaint cottages built in the 1980s, often with cute hand-carved wooden signs with funny names for the homes. One such house is literally called: “Not for Sale”. Clearly a message being given to curious passers-by!
Now, as we began to recover from Hurricane Ivan in 2004, I started to look at opportunities in my role as Commercial Director for a family-owned business with deep roots in property development. Such companies always have a “land bank” of sites for the future, but through the 1990s and early 200s, prime real estate in Grand Cayman had become not only priced high, the best was also literally “Not for Sale”, so we never considered approaching the owners to look to make deals.
The key shift we made in 2005 in our thinking was to look at the map of Grand Cayman and review what parcels of land we felt we really wanted for our land bank, then to approach the owners and ask if they were open to selling. From this, we were able to make…
