Belaire in Cabo San Lucas?
For awhile, we thought so.
We spent New Years week (week 52 for us timesharer users) in Cabo San Lucas. While there my wife was approached to attend a private residence club presentation at a pre-construction property called The Enchantment Residence Club. She was promised “a different kind of property”. To her, the “come on” sounded eerily like the one we were given to attend the Belaire presentation 18 months ago in Puerto Vallarta.
For the record, we lost about $13,000 on Belaire before we rescinded our contract. Also, I have stated somewhere in one of these threads as predicting Antonio Capela will eventually show up again in another Mexico resort community with a similar scam property. My wife agreed for us to attend the presentation since she really hoped we would find Antonio and be able to confront him. We could hardly wait to see him peeking his head around the corner and recognizing us.
As it turned out, The Enchantment was apparently NOT another Belaire scam--but there was a Belaire tie that I think you will find interesting.
The Enchantment property as proposed is a group of single family two and three bedroom homes with a central clubhouse and all the bells and whistles that Belaire offered. Their website is:
http://www.loscabosguide.com/theenchantment/. If you bother to read it, you will see that it has many similarities to Belaire--but also what appears to be some important differences like deeds, a developer with an existing track record, etc.
Now for the Belaire tie and information. We declined their offer, explaining that we had been burned at Beliare and were not comfortable buying into another pre-construction property. Our salesman apparently put the word out immediately because, as we were leaving, a young gentleman came up and introduced himself as Jaime Gomez. His first statement was that he thought he might have met us at Belaire when he was there as the Edom(sp?) Construction Company representative and that he was now fulfilling the same role for Edom at The Enchantment. I think he was there (he knew all the Belaire player’s names well) though I am not certain of his role.
For you old Belaire hands, you may remember that Edom was the second construction company at Belaire. They even had Belaire on their website for awhile and were touted by the Belaire sales staff as a guarantee that the project would eventually be built. While I do not put full stock in Mr. Gomez’s representations, here is what he had to say about Belaire:
• He thinks Belaire will eventually be built—maybe five years down the road.
• Edom pulled out of the project because they could not work with Antonio. Twice he said, “Antonio is a control freak.” He said that was his biggest problem.
• When they pulled out, Belaire owed Edom a lot of money. Antonio refused to pay and so they sued to tie up Belaire’s money. The lawsuit was recently settled for a couple of million dollars. During this time, construction progress at Belaire was brought to a halt.
• Israel Curi (who we had primary contact with for the first 6-8 months of our odyssey) is in jail for embezzlement from Belaire.
A couple of amusing asides to the presentation:
1. When we visited the model (which was predictably beautiful), I watched my wife. The first thing she did was walk into the kitchen and try to turn on the water. No water. You may remember that some on this thread in the past made a big deal out of the lack of water in the faucets at the Belaire models.
2. Towards the end of the presentation the sales person left us alone for a minute before giving us pricing. My wife asked me, "So what do you think?" I said, "Well, its eerily like Belaire except for the yacht club". Sure enough, when he came back to the table, he pulled out the brochure on The Enchantment yacht club program. It was hard to restrain the laughter.
Thought you all would appreciate how Belaire keeps rearing its ugly head up wherever we go in Mexican timeshare circles. Have a nice day.
We are in PV/NV right now and it was my plan to take a tour at this resort just to see what they had to offer and take some pictures too of the progress. However, since some of the other members here have volunteered to post some updated pictures of the progress,we don't need to bother now and the reason for this is that I received an email a few months ago from a lady who went on a presentation here but refused to buy but the BelAire resort had charged her credit card to the limit anyway. She tried to dispute it with her bank but didn't get it resolved so she warned me and wanted to know if I had a good experience with them or not. We have never been there yet so have no good or bad experience. Did this lady contact anyone of you too?
