Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Prepare for Your House-Hunting Adventure in Baja!

There are many exciting real estate opportunities in Baja, Mexico. It's little wonder that so many people are flocking south of the border to check them out. If you plan to be one of them, you should do a few things to make your house-hunting excursion as productive as possible. The first step is to find a talented, experienced and knowledgeable real estate agent. You will get that and more with RE/MAX Baja Realty. You can make all of the arrangements for meeting with an agent from home too.

Buy Insurance

You probably have no intention of getting into trouble while looking for second homes or retirement homes in Baja. As long as you buy Mexican car insurance, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. Driving in Baja without car insurance for Mexico is a big mistake. The police are allowed to detain drivers who get into accidents and don't have coverage. You can easily buy high-quality Mexican auto insurance online and have it ready to go when you arrive in Baja. Make sure to do so to ensure the smoothest, easiest visit possible.

Take a Look

After speaking with you about what you want in a Baja home, your agent will come up with a list of viable options. Upon arriving in Baja, you will be taken around to look at several of them. It's smart to bring along a notebook and camera to take notes and pictures along the way. Most people need time to compare and contrast their favorite options. In some cases, one property will immediately stand out and seem like the best option. Sometimes, though, the choice can be a lot more difficult. Either way, your agent will be there for you.

Buy a Great Baja House

By the time you find the house that's right for you, your agent will help you come up with a competitive offer. You may need to arrange for financing from your lender. Before you know it, closing day will be here. There is nothing quite like buying a beautiful home in Baja. You and your family will probably want to get it all set up to your liking right away. Whether it's a vacation home or a place to spend your retirement, your Baja home is sure to be perfect.

bajainvestment.com

Monday, February 25, 2013

How Mexico got back in the game

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 23, 2013

IN India, people ask you about China, and, in China, people ask you about India: Which country will become the more dominant economic power in the 21st century? I now have the answer: Mexico.
Impossible, you say? Well, yes, Mexico with only about 110 million people could never rival China or India in total economic clout. But here’s what I’ve learned from this visit to Mexico’s industrial/innovation center in Monterrey. Everything you’ve read about Mexico is true: drug cartels, crime syndicates, government corruption and weak rule of law hobble the nation. But that’s half the story. The reality is that Mexico today is more like a crazy blend of the movies “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network.”
Something happened here. It’s as if Mexicans subconsciously decided that their drug-related violence is a condition to be lived with and combated but not something to define them any longer. Mexico has signed 44 free trade agreements — more than any country in the world — which, according to The Financial Times, is more than twice as many as China and four times more than Brazil. Mexico has also greatly increased the number of engineers and skilled laborers graduating from its schools. Put all that together with massive cheap natural gas finds, and rising wage and transportation costs in China, and it is no surprise that Mexico now is taking manufacturing market share back from Asia and attracting more global investment than ever in autos, aerospace and household goods.
“Today, Mexico exports more manufactured products than the rest of Latin America put together,” The Financial Times reported on Sept. 19, 2012. “Chrysler, for example, is using Mexico as a base to supply some of its Fiat 500s to the Chinese market.” What struck me most here in Monterrey, though, is the number of tech start-ups that are emerging from Mexico’s young population — 50 percent of the country is under 29 — thanks to cheap, open source innovation tools and cloud computing.
“Mexico did not waste its crisis,” remarked Patrick Kane Zambrano, director of the Center for Citizen Integration, referring to the fact that when Mexican companies lost out to China in the 1990s, they had no choice but to get more productive. Zambrano’s Web site embodies the youthful zest here for using technology to both innovate and stimulate social activism. The center aggregates Twitter messages from citizens about everything from broken streetlights to “situations of risk” and plots them in real-time on a phone app map of Monterrey that warns residents what streets to avoid, alerts the police to shootings and counts in days or hours how quickly public officials fix the problems.
“It sets pressure points to force change,” the center’s president, Bernardo Bichara, told me. “Once a citizen feels he is not powerless, he can aspire for more change. ... First, the Web democratized commerce, and then it democratized media, and now it is democratizing democracy.”
If Secretary of State John Kerry is looking for a new agenda, he might want to focus on forging closer integration with Mexico rather than beating his head against the rocks of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan or Syria. Better integration of Mexico’s manufacturing and innovation prowess into America’s is a win-win. It makes U.S. companies more profitable and competitive, so they can expand at home and abroad, and it gives Mexicans a reason to stay home and reduces violence. We do $1.5 billion a day in trade with Mexico, and have been spending $300 million a day in Afghanistan. Not smart.
We need a more nuanced view of Mexico. While touring the Center for Agrobiotechnology at Monterrey Tech, Mexico’s M.I.T., its director, Guy Cardineau, an American scientist from Arizona, remarked to me that, in 2011, “my son-in-law returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan and we talked about having him come down and visit for Christmas. But he told me the U.S. military said he couldn’t come because of the [State Department] travel advisory here. I thought that was very ironic.”
Especially when U.S. companies are expanding here, which is one reason Mexico grew last year at 3.9 percent, and foreign direct investment in Monterrey hit record highs.
“Twenty years ago, most Mexican companies were not global,” explained Blanca Treviño, the president and founder of Softtek, one of Mexico’s leading I.T. service providers. They focused on the domestic market and cheap labor for the U.S. “Today, we understand that we have to compete globally” and that means “becoming efficient. We have a [software] development center in Wuxi, China. But we are more efficient now in doing the same business from our center in Aguascalientes, [Mexico], than we are from our center in Wuxi.”
Mexico still has huge governance problems to fix, but what’s interesting is that, after 15 years of political paralysis, Mexico’s three major political parties have just signed “a grand bargain,” a k a “Pact for Mexico,” under the new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, to work together to fight the big energy, telecom and teacher monopolies that have held Mexico back. If they succeed, maybe Mexico will teach us something about democracy. Mexicans have started to wonder about America lately, said Bichara from the Center for Citizen Integration. “We always thought we should have our parties behave like the United States’ — no longer. We always thought we should have the government work like the United States’ — no longer.”


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: February 24, 2013An earlier version of this column misstated the amount the United States has been spending in Afghanistan. It is $300 million a day, not $1 billion a day.