Complaint Review: Manuel Pinto realtor in Costa Rica

I have a lengthy story about looking for property, meeting with Manuel Pinto and his wife on an earlier trip.  I had met their employee agent Jose Tercero on an earlier trip, looked at property with him and on another trip, looked at some property with another agent named Hernan and another time with a French lady named Frederique. Make a long story short, I entered into a contract to purchase land from Manuel's agent Jose Tercero who also was selling his wife's property through Caribe Sur Real Estate.  I was advised to use an Attorney that Caribe Sur also uses, the name of the attorney is Roger Petersen who also wrote a book about Costa Rica law.  I entered into a  contract that Roger Petersen prepared for us to purchase the land from Jose through Caribe Sur.  I was directed by the contract to put a down payment of 10% of the sale, put this money in an escrow fund with Roger Petersen, had to pay for a wire transfer to the Costa Rica bank and pay a fee for the cost of the escrow, pay for Roger Petersen's attorney fees to prepare the contract.  All of the communication that I had with the Attorney Petersen was by email and I never met with him in person or spoke with him on the telephone.  During the process of investigating the title, I found out some information from people we met there, they are owners of a tourism property, they are from Spain and we had stayed with them.  He told me about an issue concering Indigenous land claims in the area near Margarita road where I was purchasing the property.  This caused me some serious concern and worry, I was starting to loose sleep, wondering if I could trust these people, because Jose and Manuel Pinto had not told us about the Indigenous land claim in the area and I was starting to feel that the Attorney Petersen was primarily interested in charging us attorney fees and that we may be paying his fees forever for him to manage our property and corporation, paying more than we bargained for in the future with changing laws for corporations held by foreigners or Peterson was working more for the interests of Caribe Sur who was also sending him business worth more than our small land transaction.  Jose Tercero produced a document from the local government in Bribri stating that his property was outside of the Indigenous land claim.  I was still worried and asked to pull out of the agreement.  Jose responded that he and his wife were going to keep our deposit funds.  Manuel Pinto responded by email that we had signed the contract and Jose and his wife had a right to keep the deposit money.  Roger Petersen told me that he could not get all of our deposit money back because we had signed a contract, Jose and his wife could take us to court to get the money, Petersen said that it would cost us more money for him to represent us in court if we wanted to fight to keep our deposit money, even though we had put our deposit into an escrow account.  Petersen said that the best he could do for us was to negotiate a settlement with Jose Tercero and his wife to give them half of our down payment and return the rest to us.  We got a little less than half of our deposit money returned, less a final $50 payment that Petersen charged as a final fee and then he never sent a follow up email or receipt for his legal fees.  

That is our experience with Caribe Sur Real Estate in a reduced form.  Please let me know if you have any question about our experience and we would certainly like to know more about your experience if you are interested in sharing.