This will be my first pure investment purchase, my experience up to now has involved house hacking.

So someone who is looking purely to maximize potential return (and has unlimited time) is unlikely to find this a good fit.

Or a pure rental property?

On the day of closing, we drove Anna and her son to finalize the sale, then immediately took them to the airport to catch their flight to Las Vegas.The most rewarding part of this experience came at the airport when Anna hugged us, crying tears of joy.

I don't believe you should necessarily invest purely for appreciation.

@Olivier ChaineIn all trust deed or mortgage documents written by instructional lenders that I’ve come across, a change in ownership/manager structure of an LLC holding title to a property is a violation of the “due on sale” clause, so from a purely covenant violation sense purchasing the LLC doesn’t help you.  

On a pure investment scale a mid term or short term in the midwest (omaha, KC, etc..) may net you better returns.

The only nonrecourse loans out there are pure commercial, which carry a higher rate than DSCR. 

Like Martin mentioned, I can buy my own property in other foreign countries  and make significantly higher returns (which, incidentally, is what I've been doing).So with the same amount of money that I could invest in a shared villa, I do more profitable investments, make more money and then buy my own property in Costa Rica with the extra money I'll have made and it can be a pure lifestyle purchase.This being said, if you put together a group of like-minded people who can put some money aside, decide to purchase a property together, don't really care about the return and love Costa Rica (otherwise you could do the same somewhere else), I agree that what you do can be a lot of fun!

How much time would it take you to re-coop that cost purely through the rent alone?