Property Health Program

What the Property Health Program Is

Engineering assessment on a schedule — not home watch

Home watch is a person walking an empty house against a checklist: run the taps, look for leaks, check for pests. It is a useful errand, and in Florida it sells for a hundred dollars a month, because anyone with a driving licence and a phone can do it.

This is a different product with a different buyer. A Property Health visit is carried out against the eight categories below, scored the same way every time, and recorded so that the third year is worth more than the first. What a home-watch operator cannot assemble is the part that gives the record its weight: a licensed engineer or architect who can diagnose a defect, put a technical opinion in writing, and then supervise the repair.

What it is not: a caretaker or key-holding service, cleaning, gardening or pool maintenance, rental and guest management, a warranty, an insurance product, or a sales channel for PDC construction work. The last one is written into the subscription agreement, not just the operations manual — see Independence.

Three Different Services, Often Confused

A US-style home inspection and a construction technical inspection are not the same thing, and neither is this

Which one you actually needThey differ by who is buying, when, and against what standard

What you need	The service
The condition of a property established once, before you buy it or before you list it	Home & Property Inspections — a US-standard pre-purchase inspection. One visit, one report, delivered on the timetable a real estate transaction runs to.
Someone checking that a building going up matches its drawings, its specifications and the code	Construction Technical Inspections — CFIA-registered technical inspection through the construction phases, with the bitácora and quality control that go with it. A different standard, a different deliverable, and a client who is building rather than owning.
The condition of a property you already own tracked year after year while you are somewhere else	The Property Health Program — this page. Recurring, scored the same way every visit, and worth more in year three than in year one.

Why This Sits at PDC

Four things already in the building, none of which requires new investment

What PDC bringsAnd what each one lets the programme actually do

What PDC already holds	What it means for your property
CFIA-licensed engineers and architects	A signed technical opinion rather than an observation — the kind of document that carries weight with an insurer, a buyer, or a court, and that an unlicensed inspector cannot produce in Costa Rica.
As-built drawings for properties PDC designed or built	Inspection against the actual design intent: where the waterproofing membrane runs, how the drainage was specified, what the structure was rated for. Nobody else can open that file.
Institutional relationships since 1982	The compliance tier. Municipal tax offices, CFIA, SETENA, AyA and the ASADAs, Registro Nacional. A foreign owner cannot navigate these from abroad, and a home-watch company has no standing to try.
An in-house construction management arm	Findings become supervised work instead of a report you have to shop around from four thousand kilometres away — on your election, and under the disclosure rule below.

The Four Tiers

Each rung adds a capability, not another visit

Six visits a year is the practical ceiling, and six is already hard. These houses get rented and lived in, and an inspection needs the property empty, or at least accessible for several hours with systems taken out of service. A rental calendar does not bend around a season window.

Between two visits and six there is not enough range to build a ladder on frequency — so every tier here introduces something the tier below cannot do at any frequency.

Annual subscription, quoted in US dollars, per property. The baseline inspection is priced separately — see Getting Started. Properties above roughly $3M, and properties outside the pods listed at the foot of this page, are quoted individually.

What Gets Scored

Eight categories, weighted by what actually destroys value on this coast

Every visit at every tier produces a score in the same eight categories. That consistency is the whole point: an owner with three years of comparable scores is holding a trend, and a trend tells you things a single inspection never can.

The scoring categoriesWeight, and what is failing when it fails here

Category	Weight	What fails, and why here
Building envelope, roof, exterior	20%	Flashing and membrane failure through the May–November rains; sealant breakdown under UV; gutter and downspout capacity against tropical downpour volume.
Water, plumbing, drainage	15%	Cistern and pump condition, well yield and ASADA pressure, dried-out traps in an unoccupied house, site drainage and erosion at the slope.
Electrical and backup power	15%	Surge damage from grid instability, inverter and battery state of health, generator exercise and fuel condition, corroded panel terminations near the coast.
HVAC and mechanical	15%	Condenser corrosion in salt air — the single most predictable coastal failure — plus refrigerant, drain lines, and ducts left idle through the wet season.
Structure and site	10%	Rebar spalling in exposed concrete, retaining wall movement, slope stability after heavy rain, settlement and cracking read against the as-built.
Pool and exterior equipment	10%	Chemistry in sustained heat, pump and filter condition, tile and coping, equipment corrosion, irrigation through the dry season.
Maintenance and housekeeping	10%	Termites and carpenter ants, wildlife intrusion, vegetation growing into the structure, timber and hardware condition, interior humidity.
Security and technology	5%	Cameras, alarms, access control, connectivity — and whether any of it has actually been working since the last visit.

The Year

Four season windows, because a visit outside its window is a failed visit

Two things in Guanacaste run on a fixed annual cycle: the weather that damages the building, and the obligations that fall due whether or not you are in the country. Visits are scheduled against both, not against calendar quarters. A Window A visit delivered on 12 May missed the rains, and you paid for nothing.

Essential is scheduled into Window A and Window B — before the rains and at their peak, which is the pair that catches the most on two visits. Premium, Signature and Estate add the remaining windows and, at Estate, a post-storm and post-wind check. Which windows your property uses is fixed at onboarding against its exposure, its occupancy and its rental calendar.

What a Visit Produces

A condition record — not a valuation, and not a code certificate

Between twelve and twenty fixed photo stations are established at the baseline inspection, marked on a site plan, and shot from the same frame on every visit thereafter. No station is skipped; one that cannot be shot is logged with the reason. This is the mechanism that makes year three worth more than year one — without it, a photo set is just photographs.

Systems are run, not looked at: the generator under load, every air conditioner through a cooling cycle, every pump, the irrigation zones, and every tap and trap — traps dry out in an empty house, and that is how sewer gas and insects get in. All eight categories are scored on site, on the tablet, never from memory that evening.

Every finding carries at least one photograph, a location reference to the site plan, a severity, and a cost band.

Cost bands run A under $500 · B $500–2,500 · C $2,500–10,000 · D over $10,000, which needs design before it needs a price. Report turnaround, measured from the moment the inspector leaves the property: seven business days at Essential and Premium, five at Signature, three at Estate.

What the report does not do. PDC commits to a visual and instrumented assessment of accessible areas within the published scope, to the visit falling inside its window, to the scoring standard, to the turnaround above, and to keeping the record for the life of the subscription plus five years. PDC does not commit to the discovery of concealed or latent defects, to any warranty against failure between visits, to code or permit certification, to valuation or insurance adjusting, or to an opinion on work it did not observe. No destructive testing is carried out without separate written authorisation.

Compliance

Included at Signature and Estate — and the honest version of who can file what

This is the part of the programme nobody else in Guanacaste can sell, and the split below is what makes it deliverable rather than a promise. Every item here is a live obligation that an absentee owner routinely lets lapse.

The compliance calendarWhat PDC does, and where a third party is unavoidable

When	Obligation	PDC's role
15 January	Impuesto solidario · Ley 8683	PDC's architect produces the construction-value calculation against Hacienda's methodology. Declaration every three years, payment annually.
31 January	Impuesto a las personas jurídicas · Ley 9428	Small sum, severe consequence: arrears block Registro transactions and eventually dissolve the company. PDC pays where authorised.
Quarterly	Bienes inmuebles, 0.25% · Ley 7509	PDC files and pays directly. Most Guanacaste municipalities discount an annual prepayment in the first quarter.
15 March	Corporate income tax · Form 102	Requires a contador público. PDC assembles, the accountant files. A zero-activity holding company still files.
April	RTBF · beneficiary ownership	The most commonly lapsed obligation for absentee owners, and the harshest fines. PDC tracks, prepares and chases — but it cannot be filed without the legal representative's firma digital.
Monthly	IVA · Form 150, where the property is let	The accountant files. PDC supplies the revenue record where it holds it.
Annual	Insurance renewal	PDC checks the sum insured against a replacement cost derived from the inspection. The item owners notice most.
Monthly	ASADA / AyA	PDC pays. Disconnection is fast, and a disconnected empty house is a serious problem.
Annual	ZMT canon, and concession expiry	PDC pays the canon and calendars renewal twenty-four months ahead. A lapsed concession is not recovered by paying late.

Independence

The rule that keeps the construction arm out of the report

PDC having a construction management arm is the fourth advantage in the table above, and it is also this programme's single largest risk. The moment an owner suspects the inspection exists to generate repair work, the report is worthless and the subscription is dead. So the rule is contract language, not an internal guideline.

Three things follow from it. No sales language, no quotation and no we can fix this appears inside a report. An inspector may not supervise remediation of their own finding for twelve months. And every subscriber receives an annual Findings Disposition Statement — findings raised by severity, closed, deferred, declined, and the share executed by PDC.

Getting Started

The baseline inspection, and why PDC does not want your keys

The programme starts with a baseline inspection: four to six hours with two people, billed separately from the subscription. It establishes the fixed photo stations on a site plan, benchmarks every meter, inventories equipment with make, model, serial number and install date, scores all eight categories as Year 0, and produces the five-year capital outlook. Every score after it is measured against it.

The subscription activates once the document set is complete — escritura and plano catastrado, folio real, as-builts or the PDC project file, permits and bitácora, condominium regulations, ZMT concession papers, the insurance policy and schedule, ASADA and municipal account numbers, cédula jurídica and personería dated within thirty days, owner passport, legal representative and firma digital status, emergency contacts including one in-country, and the existing vendor list.