In August 2022, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted David Ames of fraud after investors wired money into his Harlequin Property developments across St. Vincent, Barbados, St. Lucia, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. He was sentenced that September to 12 years. The number that still stops me isn't the £226 million fraud figure from his conviction — it's this: Harlequin sold 8,211 units off-plan. It built 176, all at one site, Buccament Bay in St. Vincent. Buyers wired 30% deposits into villas that didn't exist; roughly half of every deposit went to sales commissions and fees, leaving about 15% to actually build anything. Over 8,000 UK investors were affected. Before any client wires a cent, I run five checks — Harlequin is the file that taught me why.
The short answer
Before a client wires a deposit on an off-plan Caribbean unit, I check five things: the developer's capital stack — a real lender policing the money, or buyer deposits alone funding the sales machine; whether the contract delivers freehold title or a leasehold interest in land you don't actually own; whether the site has proven, working infrastructure or you're funding brand-new utilities from scratch; how walkable the location genuinely is once you're not being driven everywhere; and the property's physical position — which way it faces, beachfront or hillside, and how many feet above sea level it sits. Miss one of these and a beautiful rendering can turn into a decade of litigation. Get all five right, and off-plan remains one of the smartest entry points into Caribbean real estate.
What actually goes wrong with off-plan Caribbean projects?
Harlequin isn't a one-off. Baha Mar — the $3.5 billion Bahamas mega-resort — filed for Chapter 11 in June 2015 while reportedly around 97% complete. Construction stopped for roughly a year; Chow Tai Fook bought it in December 2016, and it opened in April 2017 (Rosewood not until June 2018). Ninety-seven percent complete, and buyers still waited years. In October 2024, a New York judge ordered China Construction America to pay original developer BML Properties $1.6 billion after finding "many acts of fraud" — an appellate court affirmed the judgment in full in April 2025, and the two sides settled the dispute that November as CCA worked through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Closer to home: of roughly three dozen CBI-approved projects in Antigua, industry observers note many remain under construction years after approval — including Pearns Point, a 137-acre flagship whose buyers reportedly include Rothschild family members. Off-plan isn't a bad bet, in Antigua's property market or anywhere else; check the concrete separately from the sales deck.
How do I check a developer's capital stack before recommending anything?
The first question I ask isn't about the unit — it's the money behind the whole project. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac generally require 50% of units presold before backing conforming mortgages; Canadian banks typically want closer to 70% presold before advancing construction financing — genuine discipline a lender imposes. Plenty of Caribbean projects have no construction lender at all — buyer deposits are the financing plan. That's not automatically a red flag, but the policing job now falls on you. I ask directly: is this project bank-financed, and if not, who verifies deposits are actually being spent on construction rather than sales commissions? How quickly — and how specifically — a developer answers that question tells you almost as much as the answer itself.
Government-backed CBI escrow helps, but read what it protects. Under St. Kitts & Nevis' real estate option, funds go into the government's or approved project's escrow account, with a seven-year hold before CBI resale. Since the October 2024 reform, minimums are US$325,000 for a condo/share in an Approved Development and US$600,000 for a standalone Approved Private Home — both down from 2023, so agent sites quoting the old numbers are wrong. The regional floor rose too: under the March 2024 memorandum among Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada and St. Kitts & Nevis (St. Lucia joined that June), the bloc-wide minimum became US$200,000 from July 1, 2024 — with Antigua at US$300,000, St. Lucia at US$300,000, and Grenada at US$350,000 for a sole purchase, or US$270,000 per share only on a qualifying two-buyer co-purchase — full comparison here; these figures move fast. "Escrow" in CBI marketing often just means the developer's own account with no verified release milestones — ask who controls disbursement and what triggers it, in writing.
Barbados does it differently. The standard is a 10% deposit held in escrow by the seller's attorney until completion, with stage payments common on larger projects — but that protection is contractual, not statutory; no regulator mandates it. Funds also need registering with the Central Bank of Barbados at time of sale, or you lose the right to repatriate proceeds on resale. None of it is automatic — your attorney has to build it in.
Do you actually own the land under your villa?
This is the question I ask before anything else, because the answer changes what you're actually buying.
Barbuda is the clearest cautionary case in the region. Land has been communally owned under the Barbuda Land Act 2007; a 2016 amendment extended maximum leases from 50 to 99 years, and a 2017 amendment, passed after Hurricane Irma, introduced individual freehold grants — a change still bitterly contested locally. In June 2022, the Privy Council ruled against Barbudan appellants challenging a resort lease, finding they held no personal property right in the leased land. I've seen buyers assume "ownership" meant freehold when the paperwork said otherwise — the title search is where that assumption gets tested, and it's a bad place to be surprised.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines runs a similar structure on Canouan, where the government leased roughly 1,200 acres — the island's northern two-thirds — to a single resort developer for 99 years in 1990, with the lessee able to sell interests out of that leasehold. On any leased-land resort, my question is blunt: what happens to your title if the head-lease is ever terminated or not renewed? If nobody can answer that clearly, that's your answer.
Contrast that with the clean end of the spectrum. The Cayman Islands has no foreign-ownership restrictions and straightforward freehold title, with no annual property tax — though stamp duty on considerations of CI$2 million or more rises from 7.5% to 10% from January 1, 2026. The Bahamas grants freehold to foreign buyers under the International Persons Landholding Act, though since 1 July 2024 the buyer's permit expires if VAT on the conveyance isn't paid and the change-of-ownership notice filed within 180 days of the grant. Freehold clarity is a real advantage for both markets — it's why land-tenure-focused clients start there.
What happens when the land law itself keeps changing?
I want to come back to Barbuda, because it's the clearest worked example of title risk I can give a buyer — and the risk has nothing to do with the developer. The developer can be solvent, the escrow can be real, the building can go up on schedule, and the ground underneath it can still be the subject of an unresolved political argument.
Under the communal system, Barbudans could occupy land, farm it and use it commercially, but not sell it individually — and anything the law classed as a "major development" required both a citizen vote and government approval. The Act originally set that trigger at $5.4 million. In 2016 it was raised to $40 million, the same year maximum leases went from 50 to 99 years. That threshold change is the part buyers skip: most large resort and villa projects now sit comfortably below the level that triggers a public vote at all.
You can see what it changed by looking at the deal that came just before it. The lease covering the roughly 251-acre former K-Club site and adjoining Crown land went to a referendum in March 2015 and passed 206 votes to 175 — a 31-vote margin on an island-wide question, and critics have argued the ballot lacked formal voter verification. Whatever you make of that vote, a project of the same size proposed today wouldn't need one.
Then Hurricane Irma destroyed roughly 90% of the island's structures in September 2017 and displaced nearly the entire population to Antigua. The 2017 freehold amendment came out of that period, and so did the most contested piece of the whole story: Prime Minister Gaston Browne's proposal to let Barbudans convert their home plots to individual freehold title for $1, usable as bank collateral. The government framed it as post-disaster housing relief. Critics, including Barbuda Council member Trevor Walker, called it a backdoor route to breaking up communal ownership and clearing the way for resale to developers. Both readings appear in credible reporting, and I don't think it's honest to pick one as fact.
That unresolved argument is the due-diligence point. A title search tells you what the register says today; it doesn't tell you that the register's authority rests on a statute amended repeatedly inside a decade by governments with opposing views of what Barbudans actually own. On any market with that history I ask a different set of questions: which statute is the title issued under, has it been amended since the developer acquired its interest, is any part of it under live challenge, and where does my client stand if the answer changes after completion? In the Cayman Islands that's a five-minute conversation. On Barbuda it's the whole file — which doesn't make the island uninvestable, and I've written separately about why it's a genuinely interesting market, but it is the history most buyers never hear before they wire a deposit.
Existing infrastructure or brand-new construction — which is the safer bet?
A finished road, working power and a functioning sewage system sound boring next to a master-planned development with a name and a logo. They're also the difference between moving in on schedule and waiting years for phase two's utilities to catch up.
Start with the cost greenfield sites hand you forever: electricity. Caribbean power runs roughly US$0.30–0.40 per kWh — among the highest rates in the Western Hemisphere, per the Inter-American Development Bank — and Cayman is no exception: CUC bills a base tariff plus a separate fuel surcharge that tracks global oil prices, so the all-in cost can run well above the sticker rate. On a brand-new site, the developer's desalination, sewage and backup power become the HOA's cost base for good. On an established site with a proven utility, someone else already absorbed that risk.
Then there's the build itself. Rider Levett Bucknall's 2025 Caribbean report tracks construction costs still climbing regionally on an already elevated base. The case for modern-code construction isn't sentimental — it's arithmetic: US mitigation research from the National Institute of Building Sciences found the 2018 International Codes return roughly $11 for every $1 spent nationally ($10-to-1 for hurricane resistance), and a foot of freeboard saves about $6 per extra $1 spent. Those ratios are US-derived, but the direction holds: proven infrastructure and modern code are cheaper to have owned than to skip.
Why does it matter whether your villa faces west or east?
Because in the Caribbean, geography is risk management, not just a view.
Tropical cyclones here track east to west, steered by trade winds on the equatorward side of the subtropical ridge — exactly why leeward, west-facing coasts like Barbados carry the "Platinum Coast" reputation, while the windward Atlantic side takes the weather first. When Hurricane Melissa made landfall in western Jamaica on October 28, 2025, as a Category 5 with 185 mph winds — the strongest landfalling hurricane in the island's recorded history — the National Hurricane Center forecast peak storm surge of 9 to 13 feet near and east of landfall on the south coast, and only 2 to 4 feet on the north coast near Montego Bay. Same island, same storm, an order-of-magnitude difference by coast alone. CCRIF paid Jamaica a record US$91.9 million after Melissa — $70.8 million of it a single tropical-cyclone payout, its largest ever.
Elevation matters too. In July 2024, Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 ever recorded in the Atlantic; preliminary assessments found 98% of the structures on Carriacou and Petite Martinique damaged or destroyed — islands long marketed as sitting safely "below the hurricane belt." NOAA projects roughly 8 to 14 inches of relative Caribbean sea-level rise by 2050. None of this means skip beachfront — ask the elevation and facing, and price accordingly. NOAA's 2026 outlook points below-normal, but Beryl and Melissa both landed in warned seasons — a quiet forecast is never a due-diligence input.
Does walkability actually affect what you can sell it for?
Yes, and more precisely than most buyers expect.
Redfin's analysis of over a million US home sales found each additional point of Walk Score adds about 0.9% to price on average — roughly $3,250 — with the marginal point worth far more at the top of the scale than the bottom: moving from 79 to 80 added over $7,000, while 19 to 20 added about $181. That's US data, but the logic travels: a unit you can walk to dinner, the marina or the beach club from resells differently than one that needs a car for everything. It's why I steer clients toward developments with a walkable core — like Christophe Harbour in St. Kitts — over isolated plots with the same view and none of the convenience.
Waterfront still carries its own premium — Knight Frank research has put the global waterfront premium at roughly 40%, beachfront closer to 58.5% — and branded product adds another layer: Savills' 2024/25 data puts the average branded-residence premium at 33% globally, 39% in resort locations. But the market is more discerning than the postcard suggests. Terra Caribbean's 2025 report shows Barbados luxury sales above US$4 million up 45% for the year, the US$2–4 million band up 127% — helped by Allure on Brighton Beach, a West Coast off-plan project that sold out before completion. Off-beach standalone homes made up 81% of Barbados's US$4 million-plus purchases in 2025, versus 45% the year before — a real shift away from beachfront apartments at the top of the market.
The exact checklist I run before a client wires anything
By the time I recommend a client sign anything off-plan, I want written or verifiable answers to:
- Who is financing construction — a real lender, or buyer deposits alone — and what percentage is presold?
- Where do deposit funds sit, who controls release, and what milestones trigger each disbursement?
- Is the title freehold, or leasehold in land the developer doesn't own outright — and what happens if the head-lease ends?
- Has the tenure law itself been amended recently, and is any part of it still contested or under live challenge?
- Does the site have working power, water, sewage and roads, or are you funding brand-new utilities as an early resident?
- Was it built to modern hurricane and flood codes, at what elevation above sea level and surge risk?
- Which direction does it face, and does that match the island's storm track and prevailing weather?
- Can you walk to dinner, the beach or the marina — or does daily life require a vehicle?
- What has this developer actually completed before, and can you speak to an owner from a prior phase?
If a developer, agent or sales deck can't answer all nine cleanly, that's diligence work still to do — not a reason to walk away automatically, but a reason to slow down before anyone wires anything. I've moved more than US$75 million in Caribbean real estate in 18 months, and the clean closings were never the ones where I skipped a question because the view was good. Want a second set of eyes before you wire anything? That's the checklist worth running — happy to walk through a specific project; book a call.
Key takeaways
- Off-plan failures share a pattern: deposits funding sales and marketing instead of construction, with no real lender policing the money — ask whether a construction lender exists and what percentage is presold.
- Freehold and leasehold aren't interchangeable — leasehold structures common in parts of the Eastern Caribbean can leave buyers with no personal property right if the underlying lease is challenged.
- The statute behind a title can move under you — Barbuda's vote threshold for a "major development" went from $5.4 million to $40 million in 2016 — so check the tenure law's history and whether it's still contested, not just the register entry.
- A greenfield site's brand-new utilities become the HOA's permanent cost base; existing, proven infrastructure shifts that risk to someone who already carried it.
- Which coast a property faces and its elevation above sea level aren't cosmetic details — the same storm can produce an order-of-magnitude surge difference on opposite coasts of one island.
- Walkable, well-built, correctly sited properties consistently outperform on resale — "beachfront" alone is no longer the whole story at the top of the market.
Frequently asked questions
What's the biggest red flag in an off-plan Caribbean contract? No identified construction lender, and no escrow release schedule tied to verifiable building milestones. If deposits are the entire financing plan and nobody outside the developer checks how they're spent, you're relying entirely on that developer's integrity.
Is leasehold land ever a reasonable basis for a Caribbean purchase? It can be — plenty of resort land in the region sits under long government leases — but understand exactly what happens to your interest if the head-lease is terminated, not renewed, or successfully challenged, and price that risk in.
Is Barbuda real estate a bad idea because of the land dispute? Not automatically, but treat it as a tenure question rather than a property question. Communal ownership, a 2016 amendment raising the public-vote threshold for major developments to $40 million, and a still-contested post-Irma move to individual freehold mean your attorney needs to confirm which statute your title rests on and what happens to you if it changes again.
Does off-plan real estate qualify for citizenship by investment while it's still under construction? Generally only once a project is CBI-approved and funds are properly escrowed under the government's structure — confirm approval status and escrow terms with the relevant Citizenship by Investment Unit, since minimums change.
Should I avoid beachfront property because of hurricane risk? No — but buy with your eyes open. Ask which coast it faces, its elevation, its storm-surge exposure, and whether it was built to current hurricane and flood codes. The same storm can produce dramatically different outcomes on opposite coasts of the same island.
How long does off-plan due diligence actually take? For an unvetted project, plan several weeks to review the developer's financing, title and land-tenure documents, and infrastructure status — longer if government escrow or CBI approval is involved. Rushing this stage is the most common mistake I see buyers make.
