Exploring Eco Living: Intentional Communities and Sustainable Design

Join Emily Bron in this episode of Age of Reinvention as she chats with visionary Patrick Heibert about his journey from tech entrepreneur to pioneer in sustainable living. Discover Patrick’s incredible projects building eco-villages in Panama and Latin America and learn about the principles guiding these intentional communities in https://www.ecovillages.life/. From eco-friendly tiny homes to Veritas Panama, explore the future of harmonious living in balance with nature. Perfect for eco enthusiasts, community planners, and those curious about intentional living.

TIMESTAMPS:
02:19 Meet Patrick Hebert: Visionary of Eco Villages
04:15 Patrick’s Journey from Tech to Sustainability
05:15 Challenges and Opportunities in Latin America
08:14 Founding Eco Villages: A New Way of Living
10:30 Veritas Village: A Model of Freedom and Sustainability
13:02 Community Life and Governance
22:08 Demographics and Global Interest
25:21 Residency and Investment Opportunities
29:23 Current and Future Projects
33:23 Exploring Surf Spots and Reef Communities
34:11 Challenges in Developing Eco-Friendly Communities
35:52 Construction Quality and Local Building Practices
37:49 Sustainable Living and Off-Grid Solutions
41:30 Community Impact and Job Creation
44:06 Technology in Sustainable Homes
48:54 Lifestyle and Activities in the Community
54:59 Future Trends in Sustainable Living
58:17 Final Thoughts and Joining the Community

Emily Bron: Welcome back to Age of Reinvention. Eco living, free cities, and intentional communities. The podcast exploring the fascinating intersections of eco living villages, freedom, and intentional communities. I’m your host, Emily Bron, and each episode brings you stories, insights, and innovation from the forefront of sustainable living And mindful urban or community design today, I’m thrilled to have a genuinely visionary guest. Patrick Heibert. Patrick is not just dreaming of a greener, more connected world. He’s building it. From laying the development foundation of tiny homes, to planting the very real seeds of eco villages in Panama and other Latin American countries. Patrick’s journey is a beacon for everyone seeking to reinvent their relationship with environment and society.

In this episode, we will explore Patrick’s transformative projects, such as ecovillages.live, and Veritas Panama discuss the power of intentional communities and explore what it takes to build a future where humanity thrives in harmony with nature. So if you are eco enthusiast, a community planner, or someone curious about living intentionally, You will notice this conversation.

Hello, Patrick. I am happy to have you in my podcast studio and look forward to your updates. about developing your eco living and intentional community projects.

Patrick Heibert: Oh, Emily, thank you for having me on your podcast. It’s always an honor to spend some time with you. So I look forward to the next few minutes or an hour or so of talking about all the things that we’ve got going on.

Emily Bron: Great. I’m looking forward to hear about updates, because I knew about your projects, some of them for years, some of them are new for me, but for our listeners and followers, probably all this would be new, and I would like to get out the mystery and to speak about essence of the communities.

But let’s start with you . Who is Patrick Heibert. Patrick, your transition from a tech entrepreneur to the pioneer in sustainable living and Eco Villages is unique and captivating journey by itself. What inspires this significant career and personal philosophy shift for you?

Patrick Heibert: I got to think back here a bit now and see like, all right, where did, where do I start?

Yeah, I have a computer science degree. I was really enjoying my computer programming life and ended up starting a software company that created software for oil and gas companies. I’m Canadian. Originally, I’ve been down in Latin America now for a couple of decades, but grew up in Canada, started the company with a friend of mine in Canada, and it’s just partly hard work, partly, I think, a decent idea, and partly just lucky timing.

The universe came together for us, and the energy sector in Canada deregulated in 1992, and so when we originally thought, we built the software, and we originally thought that, it was for each province, and then In the US there was a few companies as well, and and then both countries, Canada and the us and then later France, Australia, and a lot of other countries deregulated and really needed the software we had.

Our market went from a dozen possible sales to thousands. So it was again, just lucky timing on that front. But we were able to develop that software and sell it. And when I, my kids were young at the time, so I was very lucky to spend more time with them. And we did a lot of traveling after I sold the company and one of the spots we traveled to and I fell in love with was Central America, Latin America, obviously being Canadian, the climate down here is a lot nicer.

You can see the stuff that grows on my deck out there wouldn’t really grow very well in Canada.

Emily Bron: I’m enjoying the view, even in your room.

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, so I came down and then I was living in the Vancouver area, Vancouver Island area. It’s like the Silicon Valley of the U. S.

All the property is extremely expensive, especially if you ever want to consider waterfront property. It’s like the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s just off the charts, stupidly priced basically. And, but when I came down, a friend of a friend told me about Nicaragua, and he said, oh, it’s like Costa Rica, it’s just a lot more authentic and a lot less expensive.

So I thought, let’s try Nicaragua, and I did my research, Nicaragua turned out to be the safest country in the Americas next to Canada. So it wasn’t like I was bringing my, everybody was saying, Oh you’re going to get kidnapped and all that. I’ve, all the stories that people have about Latin America, the uninformed mainstream media watching public tends to feel like this whole area is a war zone, but it’s actually quite a bit safer than almost anywhere in North America.

So it all came down. I really love the people are super friendly. That’s a land of, beautiful beaches. Perfect weather, volcanoes, lakes, all sorts of things. And then when I started I just wanted to buy a little piece of property on the beachfront in, actually it was in Nicaragua.

It was where I first got my first non Canadian residency and I was just blown away by the prices, right? It was just so affordable compared to Canada. I could get, a hundred times the property for the same price and that I would have paid for a little postage stamp piece in Canada. So I was a little bit of a kid in a candy store.

And I bought a lot of land and, without, I wasn’t a developer at all at that point. It was just my, having been a software guy, now the software stuff and the technology stuff certainly came in and helped later in the development side with the knowledge that I was able to gain from that.

But because I was a software guy, I put up a website and went I don’t need all this land. I ended up buying one of the tracts of land was about a mile long on the beach. A mile of beachfront, which was just, obviously that’s unheard of in an area like Vancouver, San Francisco, right?

And it, it was a farm, and I just want To put a little house on the beach. Cause it had such a beautiful beach on the bay there. And in the end, I just put up this website and went I, I don’t need all this land, I just need my yard and then I can sell the rest and make a long story short that, was a popular little website and ended up selling a lot of properties to friends, family, and people I didn’t know.

So became the de facto first. Eco villages community that we have. So just to explain, who I am I’m the CEO and one of the co founders of eco villages. We have communities built over the last years in Belize uh, Honduras, by Rotan, Nicaragua, design communities in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and, have our flagship communities here in Panama.

In fact, this morning we announced the acquisition of another property here in Panama. And so we’re going to have a, another Veritas village. So Veritas village is the brand name. So to speak of what we consider the most freedom and sustainability oriented communities in the region, if not in the world, that’s our goal.

We were building these communities earlier on. I, what I consider the world was pre COVID and post COVID. And so pre COVID, it was a lot of, retirees that were looking at the communities and, your typical, what you expect to somebody that wants to go move to a warmer climate, get away from the taxation of Northern Europe or Canada or US or Australia.

So it was a pretty typical kind of resort moving crowd, I would say. But I was always libertarian in my beliefs, I do not like big government, I do not like taxes. One of the main reasons I moved out of Canada was not only the climate, but the taxation there is ridiculous and it continues to get more ridiculous with their new socialist government.

And and I don’t really see a lot of hope. It doesn’t matter if in Canada, Paulieff beats out Trudeau or if Trump beats out I guess Kamala now. And I think the, the direction, unfortunately, the momentum is set for a lot of countries and as in Europe, you’re seeing You know, France elect a socialist party UK is same, so it’s not going the right direction.

The only thing is down here in Latin America, it is going the right direction. They’ve experienced socialism for a long time, communism, and they figured out this has never worked in the world, it’s cost millions of lives, and they’re going the other direction. You’ve got Bukele in El Salvador, and Aboa is the president in Ecuador.

Mille in Argentina, Mulino here now, and I’m in Panama city today, and I’ll tell you a little bit more later, but the tour we just did and all over these countries and we regularly are doing them, but it’s becoming much more capitalist here and it’s always been a live and let live culture, right?

And, so during COVID. Even though these countries followed what all the other countries did, except for Nicaragua, they went their own path and I really appreciated them because they didn’t do any lockdowns or mandates or vaccine requirements or anything, which attracted a lot of people to Nicaragua.

But, a lot of the other countries did follow, but they didn’t come into, churches and arrest pastors and they, they would never do that sort of thing. They don’t come into your own home or knock on your door. The idea was born during the COVID times is we can create a private community down here, an intentional community that’s based on freedoms and self sustainability so that if these events happen again, which they likely will what’s round two of COVID?

We don’t really know. Is it MPOX or something else? But there will be another round, at least in my opinion, and probably multiple things, coming up. By creating these communities, we really You know, in this environment, in this culture, we really protect people from those kinds of, forces from the outside, our communities on the self sustainability side.

And just so you know, I know we talk about being green and everything. We’re certainly the furthest thing from the green new deal. I think there’s a climate obsession in the world right now. That’s ridiculous. But we call ourselves eco sensible and not eco fanatic and really by eco sensible it’s an offshoot of what we do. We really do it for self sustainability. So all our homes, for instance, in Veritas Village, Coronado, which is our new flagship community that we’re developing right now. It’s it’s basically, your freedoms come in many ways, but one of them is that we have onsite deep water mountain spring well.

So all the water on the property is as a stream running through it and everything was all the water on the property is. is independent, right? It’s from the, it’s from the site. We grow our own food. We have community orchards and gardens livestock chickens and eggs.

Emily Bron: To eco conscious, it’s what I say, and eco reliable. I absolutely agree that there is something to do for all of us to connect with nature and live in harmony, but without fanaticism.

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, and I think everybody in the world agrees that they don’t want to see garbage floating in the oceans and all that sort of stuff, but they’re, the carbon tax credits and stuff like that’s going, that’s ridiculous, it doesn’t help at all. Yeah, so I just want to put, practically where we sit in the spectrum, and then, like I said, so we have our own water, we have our own food, obviously. We build what we believe are beautiful, luxurious homes, but they’re off grid. We produce all our own power, and Really that when we close the gate to the community, it’s all private land. Everybody owns their piece of parcel, but there’s lots of amenities, everything from music studios and woodworking shops to, fishing ponds and gyms and a school, a clinic, all sorts of things.

So it’s like a little town, but it’s not going to be impacted by the next event like COVID. So that’s what we really do. And these are luxury homes. People sometimes think it’s off grid, you’re producing your own power.

Emily Bron: You’re speaking about Veritas now. Let’s be clear. Yes.

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, exactly. so Veritas villages are going to be a group of communities. We’re in the process, and I was shopping for land over the last few weeks here in different countries. But Veritas Village Coronado is a very popular expat zone here inside of Panama, the country of Panama.

And we found the perfect property for it. About a thousand feet in elevation where everything grows, it’s a little bit cooler. A lot of people like to be on the beach, but then they realize it’s extremely hot in this part of the world. We’re only 10-15 minutes from the beach, so you can go to the beach, but then you can go home to a cooler climate that’s a lot more comfortable.

And these are luxury homes, some of them are tiny homes, some of them are five bedroom mansions and anything in between. But I find everybody really gets together at the welcome center, has a glass of wine, watches the sunset or whatever. And everybody gets along because we’re all like minded.

We’re all, we’re not forcing anybody to be libertarian or whatever the political views are, but people understand if you’re on the far left, for instance, you’re probably not going to enjoy our communities.

Emily Bron: You know what I have specific questions about, requirements, I would say nature of community.

So my next question, just at this point, with your leadership, ecovillages. life, actually it’s your company, has been at the forefront of promoting sustainable living. What are the core principles? That guide your vision for intentional communities, for eco living.

Patrick Heibert: We created what we call the FIRST certification, or FIRST philosophy.

It’s F I R S T, and it stands for Freedom, Independence, Resilience, Sustainability, and Transparency. And I think, people get the picture. We’re all about, living in a and freedom comes in different forms, right? The beauty of being off grid and having your own water with And your own food grown on site, you have financial freedom.

There’s very little cost to living in one of these communities because you don’t have your power bill is zero, right? Your food is all around you and you can just go, pick papayas and bananas and chicken eggs and everything. And you can live a very nice life, pretty close to zero dollars.

And so you have that financial freedom. Then you live with like minded people. So you actually can say what is on your mind without being censored or canceled. And, to me, that’s one of the nicest things. Like I’ve met most of the people that are moving into Veritas Village Coronado, and they’re all great people.

They’re just, everyday people that are sick of, being afraid of what they’re going to say, whether it’s in front of family or friends, but, and, have some, somebody have, basically, Censoring them or cancelling them so you’re not really welcome in this group anymore because of Your radical thoughts, right?

Even though they’re generally common sense.

Emily Bron: Have some requirements, I would say, interview, because, new people coming to your community, people from all walks of life, as you mentioned, different countries, but you need to be sure that it will be matched with your core principles of community.

leader and, with all members of community. Do you have some requirements of how the process is working on this side?

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, no, it’s interesting cause anybody can move into these communities. It’s not a narrow band of, if you have to think like this, but I’m very open with being libertarian.

I’m very open that I don’t like big government, big taxes. If you’re the kind of person that thinks the government should take care of you, And you’re probably going to find out pretty quickly that the people that live in this community or myself on webinars and podcasts like this, I’ll be very blunt about it.

It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just I don’t think you’re going to be happy if that’s your, if that’s your mental thoughts. A lot of people meet me or whatever, or my wife, Andrea, or some of our staff, and we all are pretty like minded that way. And so if they talk to us and they start asking questions about the community.

Pretty quickly we’ll find out what our core values are and, freedom and resiliency and being transparent. I think I’ve talked to you before about how our HOA works, HOA, homeowner associations are always a pain and we think we’ve found a solution that is going to work very well.

But when we start explaining these things. It self regulates and so far everybody that is moving into the community and we’ve only really announced this community a few weeks ago, and I think we’re about 70 percent sold out already. It’s been extremely popular.

Emily Bron: So how many people, now I am very curious.

So you have a plan for several communities, yes? And in your first phase, I would say, how many people you have already enrolled or purchased property, or actually how it’s working? They purchase property, land, book a home, and how many members?

Patrick Heibert: We reserved a bit of land for an expansion and we have the ability to, an option to acquire some more, but currently there’s 87 home sites.

It’s actually pushes up to a well over 100 in the end, but with the reserved land, but so that’s it’s a bit small for, to be honest. For the size but, we’d like to see it more like 2 or 300 homes. Because you have to put in all the amenities and infrastructure and everything, and there’s a kind of a break even point.

But this property, it was just so perfectly ideal, it checked all the boxes, with everything we ever imagined. So it’s hard to find these properties. I looked at 50, 60 properties probably to find this one. And it was perfect and we decided even though it’s a little bit smaller than we’d like it to be, it works and we’re working on acquiring more land around it.

So that, it, typically what happens is people buy the lot, the home site. And then we work with them. We have a number, we have a dozen or so or more home models of different sizes, or people can bring in their own custom home designs or modify one of ours or whatever. I think our architectural department is amazing.

I’m always pleasantly surprised at how beautifully and efficient and well designed these homes are. So yeah, we have what we believe are really beautiful designs, but people Can, bring the, bring whatever designs they want. And, we take a look at them and make sure that you’re not building something really bizarre that would lower the value of your neighbors, but anyway, that, so that’s the process.

It’s not unlike, they get a title to their land, just like they do anywhere else in the U S or Europe or Canada or wherever, and so it’s the, very similar type of approach. You come there, most people come and see the land. Some people have bought their homesites sight unseen. But we work with them to pick out the property, what they’re, are they liking the view.

We have beautiful ocean views, we have, jungle, we have forest, we have down by the stream. All sorts of different types of properties within there.

Emily Bron: It’s working as a condo, under the condo rules as we know in North America or like cooperative, like how’s this legal?

Patrick Heibert: No it’s basically fee simple titles. The down here in Panama, each country has a little bit different version of what they call it or how they perform it. But the Latin American law or the Latin American countries, all except for Belize. are under civil law. Whereas U. S., Canada beliefs are common law.

So common law originated in the U. K. Civil law originated in Spain. Obviously, those are the countries that conquered these different areas. That’s where their laws came from. But the laws are 98 percent similar. But here in Panama, they call it a PH, which is in Spanish, but pro horizontal property regulations.

And basically it just, it’s a, it’s one form of a residential community where you can create an HOA that has different rules and regulations. Now because we’re a freedom oriented community, we make our regulations very light, right? And we have some, dispute resolution approaches. As I mentioned on the HOA, I don’t know if I mentioned it to you before or not, but we’re going to be using a DAO, which is a decentralized autonomous organization for our homeowners association.

And really what that means is the DAO is a blockchain, much like Bitcoin is on a blockchain, a transparent, autonomous way of voting. And so instead of electing, I’ve been doing this a long time and every HOA president is generally well hated, right? Because they can’t possibly. They can’t possibly please everyone, right?

And sometimes they’re a little detached from what people want. So they make decisions like we should build a, I don’t know, a pickleball court, and maybe the people didn’t want to pick a ball court, and they spend money in the HOA on things that people didn’t want. And so this, the Dow really gets past that.

There’s no HOA president. There’s an advisory committee that decides, okay, these are the things that we’re going to vote on, and then they vote online on, on a blockchain, and it’s fair. The only people you can really blame then, if you didn’t get your way, is your neighbors, because they outvoted you.

And you can set different limits. You can say it needs a 75 percent majority to vote. To have this instituted or whatever this decision, but we as a developer back out immediately, and we’ve already sold more than half of the properties anyway, but if Panamanian law, once you’ve sold more than half.

Then the community decides, not the developer.

Emily Bron: And you’re going to live, you will have your home at this village as well, correct? You will be part of community?

Patrick Heibert: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I generally have a home in each one of our communities, but yeah, we’ve already picked out our site. I’m working on the plans for my home now, so yeah, absolutely.

And it’s only an hour out of the city where our offices are right now. Our head office is Here in Panama City and Coronado is about an hour drive or so from the city. So it’s it’s really, a beautiful place and the beaches all, many beaches nearby there. And so it for me, it’s convenient too.

And it’s great. Spend a lot of time there already.

Emily Bron: So what is the demographic of the people who coming to this particular village, from what countries, what ages, what family type?

Patrick Heibert: That’s a great question because you know what, it’s changed a lot from our pre COVID days, right? So like I was saying, there’s two eras for us in development of communities and then post COVID a ton of young families.

In fact, the demographic has switched to what it was before pre COVID is usually, I would say, 45 years old and older people because they were, if not at retirement age, they were affluent enough to have a, a second home and they wanted to use it as a vacation home and then when they retire, they’re going to move into it.

So that was a pretty typical story for our pre COVID days. Now it’s radically different. Now we have families from all over the world with different age kids. That’s why we’re having a school on this community. It’s a, it’s an expat libertarian school.

Emily Bron: So I’m following, and it’s a specific question for the school, because I’m very excited when I don’t have school children about all these projects for expat children.

But let’s speak about, what kind of people, because I know, I believe our conversation will go, it will be spread worldwide. And people will ask the question, like, how can I join what, I understand, first of all, that main spoken language is English, correct?

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, I mean, most of the expats that’s, that are moving here to these communities are English speaking, it’s always nice to know Spanish.

My Spanish is terrible. My Ecuadorian wife reminds me of that every day, but it’s, I get by and I’ve been down here for decades. It’s just for whatever reason, I guess I have a bit more of a math brain than a language brain. But just to, go further a little bit on the demographics. A couple weeks ago I was at the property and we had lots of visitors coming to see it.

And, it’s one of those things where almost everybody that comes to see it. buys a lot because it’s such a beautiful, it sells itself. But what was really interesting is 10, 8 to 10 people in a row or couples in a row had like young kids or teenage kids and came from all over the world. There was Italy, Germany, Netherlands.

Ireland, Scotland, UK France, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, U. S. So ten in a row that weren’t from the same place. But all have like minds in terms of seeing, being awake to what’s going on around the world and authoritarian governments, Netherlands has their farms being taken from the government.

And every country has some issues, Canada’s freezing bank accounts and all that sort of stuff. So people are concerned, and in the U. S. a lot of concern is about potential collapse of banks. So people want to get their money out. Panama City is a banking capital of Latin America.

People are doing multiple things. Getting their money out of their existing countries. They don’t want their bank accounts frozen or their banks to collapse. And, getting residency down here is quite easy. So you don’t have to ever leave. If you don’t want to, you can go from resident to citizen.

So you can get your passport here in Panama in five years.

Emily Bron: So by buying home, they can, it’s a path to get the residency, like in case of your community.

Patrick Heibert: Yes. Not all countries are, not all countries have that residency by investment, but Panama has a great one. Right now there’s two, there’s a, what they call the friendly nations visa.

Which is 200, 000 spent on a home. And you can apply and it’s very quick. Like usually in a few weeks you have your residency down here. And I’m obviously a resident of Panama as well as a number of other countries down here. But and there’s then the golden visas. So if you come from a country that’s not on the, Friendly nations list, maybe China, or I don’t even know what they all are, to be honest but the, you can still get it become resident.

It’s 300, 000 right now. They’re talking about increasing that this fall, but I suspect they won’t for a year or so anyway. But so right now, if you want to buy a 305, 000 home, it doesn’t matter from where you are in the world. You could buy a home at eco eco villages at Veritas village. And then go, and we can connect you with a lawyer and the lawyer helps you get your residency and within a few weeks you’re a resident and you’re building your home.

So it’s quite handy in Panama. I just did a tour of Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica for including Panama, five countries in six days, which was a little exhausting, we’re talking to the governments myself and we work together with TIPOLIS, which is a.

Free Cities Corporation they’re working on creating, basically a Singapore in Latin America. And so we’re working very hard on that Ecovillages is going to be involved with that as well. We are meeting with the ministers in these different countries and try to explain what they should do in order to attract citizens from different parts of the world and to build one of these Singapore cities that has its own governance.

And we’re putting our money where our mouth is with the Veritas villages. We’re creating these freedom oriented communities, but it’s, we’re also trying to take it completely to the next level, which is a fully self governed city within one of these countries.

Emily Bron: So what is the vision at this point of Veritas, it might grow to what? A couple of thousand people, inhabitants living in one community or?

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, that’s certainly possible. We’re also there’s going to be Veritas, like I said earlier, we acquired our second property and we’re actually working on a third here in Panama because Panama has been very popular.

And I also did the tour, as to Mexico. We’re working on acquiring land in Mexico Costa Rica and Argentina right now, and probably Ecuador. So those are the top four countries for various reasons. Either their tax laws are beneficial, they have a libertarian, or at least a capitalist mindset.

Now the Mexico’s got a very easy residency program there, there’s lots of benefits to these countries. They’re all amazing countries with a little bit different twists on how they deal with things. But the beauty of being a Veritas Village community member or resident.

Even if you’re a resident here in Panama and you decide, you know what? I’d love to go for a vacation to the wine country of Mendoza in Argentina. We’re working on a Veritas village there. You could go stay at one of our Veritas villages there. You get all the perks of the amenities and the discounts at the restaurants and all sorts of things, because you’re a member of a Veritas village community in another country, or some people are looking at buying.

Three different homes, maybe one on the Caribbean side, one on here on the Pacific side, where I am right now Pacific ocean is just out those doors. And then maybe one in, like I said, in Argentina, in the Mendoza area. So you get three totally different seasons. You might spend four months in each home and be a bit of a digital nomad.

And a lot of people can do that because, the home prices in North America, Europe, Australia are so high. That they can take that whole single home, sell it and. By two or three down here in different regions, and then still have a lot of money left over to live off of. So that’s a pretty common story down here too.

Emily Bron: Tell me please, at this point, in what countries and what names of the communities are, which already inhibitable, I would say. The people can move, buy, and living already. Because I understand all these projects in different stage of development. I was not sure that Mendoza, which I was following for a long time.

There are already some people, some homes over there? At what stages? Yeah, the Mendoza

Patrick Heibert: Let me back up a little bit. You could move into the Aruna community that we designed in Belize on Ambergris Key. It’s both for a community for living in and also for vacations.

It has vacation homes in it as well. It’s very pretty. It’s on the canal right on the Caribbean. So you can, paddle board or boat right up to your front door and go out in the Caribbean. And the reef is beautiful there. Obviously, all the amazing fish and things to see in there is snorkeling and diving.

It’s a huge Mecca for that. In Honduras, our reef community is just completing now. So they’re going to be able to move in the next few months. Playa Pacifica, our Nicaraguan beachfront property have people moved in this year. So homes earlier this year, people were starting to move in. So it’s a growing community.

But the thing is, these communities are never. necessarily done. It’s like I was telling somebody this yesterday. They’re trying to say, like, when is this going to be done? It’s when you build a town, when is it done, right? It just, or a city, it just keeps growing typically.

Emily Bron: But you have phases like first phase launched people already living in.

And, next is developing nearby, as far as I understand, and how it works in the cities usually, yeah, but you can live, you can enjoy already.

Patrick Heibert: The Veritas Village Coronado that I’ve been speaking about, we just received our permits from the government to go ahead and do it a few weeks ago.

We’ll be, building the homes over the next year. So I would say probably it’s still a year away from people living there, having the restaurants and we, we have the welcome center people can stay, and all sorts of things. We’re making the roads, the water tower, all these things right now, the infrastructure.

So it’s happens in parallel. But like I said, Playa Pacifica, for instance, in Nicaragua, you can move there, they’re in the greater neighborhoods of Grand Pacifica that it’s part of. There’s probably about three or four hundred people living there now. So it’s, and it’s a mix, right?

Some people live there year round, some people are snowbirds, from different parts of the world that just want to get out of their winter climates. And so they’re there from maybe Thanksgiving to Easter. And then there’s, there’s people that vacation. So it’s a nice mix too, because you always get fresh people coming there, sitting there at the, the pool or the restaurants.

And you meet lots of interesting people from around the world, but there’s a lot of people living there already.

Emily Bron: And you have also, or maybe would you have rental? options because like people cannot buy probably in all these places. So how it will work, it will be ownership and rent out opportunities for some people who, for example, want to spend only winter season or look around.

Patrick Heibert: We have our own rental department, a property management piece of our company, and it manages the taking care of the homes. If you want to spend two weeks in your home a year as a vacation, that’s fine. We rent it out the rest of the time if you want to, or you don’t have to.

You can just have it taken care of. Some people don’t want to rent out their home. They don’t like the wear and tear and all that sort of thing, but other people want the rental revenue. And usually in our communities, the rental revenue is pretty, pretty amazing because, we obviously put a lot of work into building beautiful homes in a beautiful location.

And so they’re nice places to stay. And, for instance, we are just finishing the tiny homes that people are moving into. We call them tiny homes, but they’re actually small two bedroom homes, right on the beach. One of the most beautiful beaches in the world, in my opinion. Used to be a place where I would, I would go swimming 25 years ago and nobody knew about it.

Emily Bron: What country? Please name the community.

Patrick Heibert: That one’s in Nicaragua. So it’s a beautiful little calm bay, but it’s, within a couple hundred feet of a reef where you can see the surf break. So it’s a very popular surf spot. There’s a, there’s what’s called a reef break, which is more for professional surfers, and then there’s an a-frame sand break for people that know surfing.

And that’s, much more for beginners or moderate level surfers. But the beauty of it is you can stay in your home, look out your window and you can see the surf coming in and go, Oh, this is a great day for surfing. I’m heading out there. So that makes it a really great destination as well.

And then for instance the reef community and in Honduras where people are going to be moving in very shortly, that’s a popular rental place as well, because it’s looking out at the diving Island of Roatan, which is world famous for diving and it’s got it’s unusual because it doesn’t really have any Non peak or shoulder seasons for rentals because in the North American or European winter, all the North Americans and Europeans are coming down there for their vacation.

And then in the opposite season, the South Americans are coming up because they have their winter. And it’s nicely in the middle and not all the countries down here like El Salvador doesn’t have any Caribbean side. So you get a lot of affluent El Salvadorians going to Honduras for their vacation on the Caribbean.

Because it’s right next door and it’s beautiful Caribbean waters, white sand and turquoise water. And so they, they don’t really have that down season that a lot of destinations do, right? So if you look at a Cancun in Mexico, it’s super busy between Thanksgiving and Easter, but this time of year right now is not necessarily you can get a lot of good deals, which is nice, but it’s always got people there, but not so packed. Whereas, some destinations and, we’ve choose those purposely for rental revenue. It really boosts your rental revenue not to have a down season.

Emily Bron: So you mentioned a lot of different projects and in different countries.

I’m wondering can we a little bit discuss your challenges while developing eco friendly intentional living communities, say, in Nicaragua, Panama, Belize, and Mexico? Are they similar challenges, or there are some specific issues in each country, aside from the, development and, Legal rules, which obviously exist in every country, what it’s coming with your experience.

What are the differences between communities for you or your experience?

Patrick Heibert: There’s certainly no shortage of challenges and there’s a lot of variety to them. But I always say the barriers to entry to what we do for a living is so high that I have no fear of the competition because I’m only still doing this after a couple of decades because I’m so stubborn.

It’s just, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of challenges. Obviously the permitting is probably the one I like the least. Cause when you have a vision for a property, you just want to do it. You just want to make it reality. And then you’re waiting 18 months to two years sometimes before you even have, it’s all the environmental permitting and everything.

And that’s great. I’m glad that the country is Costa Rica and Panama have the most stringent rules for environmental and various, and the most departments that you have to go to. There’s about eight different departments that create the rules, and they’re changing them all the time because every time you get a new election, a new party, and they add some or take some out or whatever.

So the world’s always moving, they’re always moving the goalposts, but that’s probably our biggest challenge. And then the second one would be quality of construction. It’s really, I don’t mean this as a shot at all. The Latin American culture is much more what I call function over form, if in, in North America, for instance, in the U S if you have.

Crown molding on the top, between your ceiling and your wall. You don’t want to see paint, painted from the ceiling going over your crown molding and back up again. That just looks, to a North American, European, Australian, whatever, that looks sloppy. Down here, it’s much more it’s function, it’s functional.

The wood is protected from the paint, by the paint, and it doesn’t really matter what it looks like. So that’s a real challenge. We actually in our Veritas Village communities, we do all the construction. We make a very fair price, competitive with all the other construction companies down here. Lots of Americans, especially we’ll come down and think, Oh, I’ll just hire the local builder.

And then I’ll go back up to Florida or wherever, New York and it’ll just be fine because that’s what I would do in North America. It would be great. And then they come down, they don’t even know what’s all wrong with their house. Like a lot of times the. The rebar, it’s hidden in the concrete once the concrete’s over it and the rebar is either not there or it’s extremely tiny.

The local companies are going to go I’m not being watched and there’s not, we don’t have the inspectors down here like you do in most countries. So nobody’s coming to check on it and then, the owner comes back and is disappointed and that reflects on the whole community. So I’ve seen that happen an awful lot where You know, people build their own homes.

They’re a disaster and there’s not much left that you can do except bulldoze them down After paying for them and it’s just it reflects on the whole community and that hasn’t happened to us because we don’t allow it to happen but I’ve seen that happen over and then you know, we have you know When that happens you have one really disappointed owner and they talk about it to everybody else So you don’t get the word of mouth marketing and, people might think that’s you’re being control freaks, right?

You’re doing all the construction. It’s you know what we’re doing it for our sake as well to make sure that everybody’s happy. But mostly for the customer to make sure they’re happy because, we have a very quality builders that we worked with over years and they know exactly what we expect for the quality of the building.

And we inspected ourself. We have our own inspectors because There is no government inspectors coming to check your home like there is, even your electrical, who knows how it’s wired if you don’t have anybody checking it.

Emily Bron: And each country has its own material, like construction material, and you need to know, what is good for this particular climate.

What is working up north might not work and will not work in this climate. And even I know in such countries, Mexico, which is so big, With different regions, like the building can be built from the different materials. Yes.

Patrick Heibert: Absolutely. A lot of people don’t understand that, right? In the highlands, you might be able to build out of wood because you have, less heat less termites and things like that.

But down by the beach, you sure can’t build out of wood. The home will last maybe two years and it’ll be a pile of sawdust after that. But people do it and they don’t understand that because the, the termites, the salt spray, the UV. Everything you can’t put standard doorknobs on your door, though, on the ocean, you have a ton of salt spray, and it just eats that, all the metal away, so you, there’s lots of things you have to do differently, plus, a lot of times, North Americans and Europeans tend to, what I consider, Jam a square peg into a round hole.

They try to teach the people down here how to build a wood stick frame home. They don’t do that. They build concrete and steel homes and these homes that we build are concrete and steel and they’ll be here 500 years from now and, like castles in Europe, right? So we know what we’re doing and we know because we work with what the locals have known for hundreds of years and what works.

Now, we add different things like insulation because, these are off grid homes. We want to make sure they’re very efficient and stay cool and, the air conditioners are super high efficiency. Our solar systems are massive compared to what most people think of solar systems because we want to make sure you never run out of power, you get all sorts of different things.

The solar systems are much more quality power than the local grids down here. People don’t understand that a lot of Latin American countries. Power is, not very stable, and also not very good quality. It’s varying all the time. You get brownouts. It’s really hard on air conditioner, compressors, and refrigerator motors, and all those sorts of things.

I’ll we’ve gone through all that school of hard knocks two decades ago, right? So there’s a lot of lessons that are stuck up in our heads that, it’s really beneficial for people to just, learn. To move into one of our communities because they’ve got to short circuit all the problems that they’re going to have.

Emily Bron: So I understand you have your own like architectural department, construction department, locals from each country who knows who know, how to build from the local materials. And I understand it’s one of the reasons that you build construct yourself after all the years of experiences with understanding of differences between countries, correct?

Patrick Heibert: Yes, exactly. And it’s like I said, it’s not to be a control freak. It’s to control quality. I’ll tell you some quick, let’s tell you some funny stories. So 20, 25 years ago when I was building the first home. In Nicaragua and I was the same guy. I was that guy that came down and went, oh, if I hired somebody in Canada to do this, it would just be built quality wise.

There would be inspectors, it would just get done properly. The first home that I had built, they, they put the foundation in and they put it on the wrong yard. They put a whole foundation with a basement and everything on a property that wasn’t mine, . And so that I had, I not only had to pay for that, I had to pay to demolish it and refill the.

The hole in the ground, then they, I went back and said, okay, this is my property. Put it here and they put it backwards. They decided that the back of the house looked better facing the road in the front of the house. So again, I had to demolish the foundation Turn the house around and then, one of the funnier ones, there’s just, someday I’m going to write a book on all these, construction stories. So we had one home that was owned by what was it?

Seven different owners. It was a fractionally owned home. And I thought, Oh boy, this is going to be a challenge building this home. Cause everybody’s got a different opinion, but it went remarkably well. And then when we went to choosing the interior paint colors, for the home. I thought this is really going to be challenged.

But we basically picked a room. Everybody got to make their own choices for that room and everybody picked reasonable colors and it all blended well together and they worked well together, which I was very happy with. But there was something like 16 different colors in the house. And so I actually went in there having experienced this before I went in there and I.

I wrote on the wall with a pencil, Sherwin Williams number 1177 or whatever. All the paint colors on each wall and, exactly how accent walls should be done and everything. And I remember it was a Thursday. I came in to see the house and I was impressed. It was like, wow, you guys painted exactly as per the specifications, exactly what I asked you to do, based on what people wanted.

And I said, I’ll be back on, on Saturday to check the second coat. And I came back in on Saturday and the entire house interior was robin egg blue. And I was like what happened? And they’re everybody likes blue. It’s come on, what really happened? So while we had a lot of blue I said you had a lot of other colors too, because there’s 16 other pales of paint over there that weren’t used.

So what really happened? And the real reason was they painted over the numbers. And I was like come on, you, now you had the colors, but they didn’t, they weren’t asked to do that. So that what they did is what they knew. And it was like I guess people love this color. We’ll just put it on there.

People would be very surprised at the level that you have to get to in detail to make sure that you get a quality built home.

Emily Bron: It’s not so easy even to build in your own country, I would say, because of It depends on who constructor is, but In completely new culture and Now you have communities in different countries with actually Different culture sometimes and understanding of how it should be built that you should have like quality control in place, actually.

Probably some department engineer or somebody experienced, probably your son. I know he’s very experienced in the, in all construction over the years. To check all this not only colors, main construction, main points and how it works now for you. Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Heibert: Our typical way of doing it is we have our management, our general contractors, the construction in each country and in some of our own kind of.

Different levels of engineers in each country. And then we will either outsource or hire the local people in the community. Oh, it’s partly to support. One of the biggest things, we also have a foundation called help them help themselves that I’ve been doing for many years.

We’ve built clinics and schools and homes and. Done medical brigades and dental brigades and, helped thousands of people with different things. And it’s a, part I’m very proud of but when the one thing we found that is the making the biggest difference in these countries that, that, that needs some, assistance in some areas is creating jobs.

So we’re very conscious about, we don’t ship in a crew, even if we, Even if we, wanted to, we, we could, and it would probably go a little bit more smoothly because we’re always retraining people. But the retraining is extremely beneficial to the local people in the different villages around us.

You teach somebody how to do, the different trades well, then the next time, an expat moves in there and they do a good job, they’re going to have a lot more work. And we’ve been very, promoting a lot of local expertise and doing micro loans for people to start their own businesses.

You’re, you need a lot of heavy equipment, usually when you’re creating community and roads and stuff. So we’ve, we’ve, Loan people money to take diesel mechanic courses or something like that to, start their own little businesses. And it’s really been rewarding. I look at the Nicaraguan one. Our first community was called Milagro Verde, which means the green miracle in Spanish.

And I called it that because nobody thought I could do it. My son and I were living on a boat. That’s where we learned about self sustainability. We, caught our own food, desalinated water, produced our own power with solar systems and things like that. And I wanted to move that to land.

And where is it easier to find, a lot of sunlight than, closer to the equator? We were able to create this off grid luxury community in, in Nicaragua. And that was, like I said, a couple decades ago. And what I love about that is that spinoff. from that has been, you can see it in the communities around it, right?

So we hire construction people and we have a restaurant there and different things like that. So all those people are making a good living and then they’re shopping from the local, village grocery store. They’re getting their motorcycles fixed and all the different spin off sundry work has created a totally different economy around our community.

And the people love it because, we were the ones that kind of supported that and grew it and now their lifestyle is much better. Most of the people were living with dirt floors at the time. Sometimes even just plastic wrapped around trees in some of the communities around there.

And now they have beautiful concrete and steel homes with tile floors. And they love to invite us over and show us their homes or their gardens because they learn from the sustainability side of it. Growing their trees and things like that. So that’s been the, the, that’s the rewarding part that counters the frustration part sometimes.

Emily Bron: No, it’s a mutual benefit and I believe that probably after a couple of years you might get to in your community members some locals who are, appreciate not only quality, but community spirit and really good match to the old vibe that you’re trying to create as community builder. Yeah.

And we don’t,

Patrick Heibert: we don’t aim at expats only. I’ll admit most of our communities, are heavily expat populated, but there’s a lot of local. Locals that move into our communities as well. And that’s great. We, like I said, with the number of people from around the world and then you have locals there as well.

So it’s really a very diverse kind of communities.

Emily Bron: Great. What role the technology play in creating your sustainable homes? Like I remember, I know about the tiny home projects tiny home features. So I’m wondering how it’s now when you have all kinds of sizes and different type of projects for homes.

Patrick Heibert: Whether it’s tiny homes or large mansions or somewhere in between we, we make very efficient homes. I would say that there’s a couple areas. We do hydroponic gardens and things like that and the technology involved with that and the pumping the water through is all. So my history and technology has been very beneficial.

But the area where it’s actually been probably the most beneficial is on the solar systems. To be able to be perfectly off grid like we are with enough power to, have all your air conditioning and multiple fridges and freezers and flat screen TVs and bowling alleys for all I care in your home, it’s only been, I would say in the last three to five years that the solar systems have gotten to the point where the battery technology and the inverter technology is.

And panels, the solar panels as well, has really come to the level that it’s affordable and it makes you completely self reliant and it produces more power than you can ever use. And that technology and my understanding of it, cause I’ve been playing with it since, in the late eighties or nineties.

And so very intimately knowledgeable about solar systems and we put together our own systems. And my software background has obviously been very helpful for that too, because I understand what’s happening behind the scenes in these systems, and I can set them up to work very well for our environments.

But like I said, we have lots of things that go into the architectural designs of homes, clear story windows, you want that top window area to let the heat out. Most of the time, what you’re working with here is, you is trying to dissipate heat. Coming from Canada, I was always trying to keep warm.

Down here, you’re always warm enough. So you’re trying to keep cool. And none of the homes down here have any source of heating. The pools aren’t heated. They stay plenty warm, like in the eighties and Fahrenheit. So they’re, they’re, you’re always dealing with the most efficient, insulated smart way of making a home to, and, we use technology too, for lots of things, i, some people don’t the different technology cause it feels invasive. I know enough about private networks and things to, to make it work. And I really liked the things like I, our air conditioners are internet connected, so we can turn them off. So especially if you’re renting a home, one of the biggest uses of power, and it’s not so much important when you’re connected.

to a solar system because you’re not paying for the power anyway. But, when you’re connected to the grid and in these countries down here, some of the power costs are pretty high. And we have systems where the air conditioners can be switched off. So somebody checks out lots of times you’ll have somebody check out, let’s say early in the morning, they’re going to their flight at the airport.

Nobody gets into home till maybe later that afternoon to clean it. And in between, they’ve got the home set down to so cold, the air conditioners that are using a lot of power. So we have an, an automated thing where if they, when they check out, we can switch the air conditioners off. And it saves the owner of the home a lot of costs and power, which means they’re going to get more Profit on their rental revenue.

So there’s some of those features that we used on the technology side that are, they’re not technology for the sake of technology. There’s technology for the sake of finance to benefit you financially.

Emily Bron: Efficiency. It’s efficiency. And speaking about internet, how you can ensure internet and different communities use a satellite or

Patrick Heibert: I guess I should I guess I should thank Elon Musk for creating Starlink.

Because that’s been a godsend for us that was one of the areas where, it was difficult in the local countries here, didn’t always have great service. In fact, a lot of people like for our Veritas Village Coronado, a lot of people like the fact that it’s low EMF, the electromagnetic fields, right?

Because it’s set up in an area that’s far away from. From cell towers and things like that and so and you know a lot of people like that You know here in the city I’m bombarded by 5g and everything but out there I’m not and whether you’re sensitive to that or not or what I don’t think anybody really likes the idea of feeling Like they’re sitting in a microwave, so you know that you know after I did some testing it was Interesting so I can’t remember the unit of measure right now.

I’m not an expert in it We had experts come in and take a look at it, but I at Veritas Village the reading was 27 on the meter and all green lights. It was all perfect. And then I came into the city in our apartment and it was 35 million not not 27 million versus 35 million. It’s 27 the number 27 versus 35 million on the charts of this, of the number of electromagnetic fields that were being bombarded with.

So a lot of people like that too. And, we. We, we like the fact that with Starlink from, the, that, that internet, you can wire, like some people want it just completely wired. They don’t want wifi in their home and, to each their own. I, it doesn’t, I don’t feel like I’m affected by wifi.

I like the convenience of it. So Starlink works great for us, but we get very high speeds, many webinars, many, I like watching sports and I watch, high speed sports on. Internet up there. I’ve done many videos and podcasts and things from these starling systems. It’s pretty amazing. It’s been, it’s really been great because we can put them in, we can put ours, we can put our communities anywhere in the world right now and have internet and power and all we got to make sure is that the place that we choose has, a beautiful place, but also has.

Good water in the ground and our water is excellent quality. We’ve had it tested and people, the tester is saying you should just bottle this and sell it. It’s perfect alkalinity and everything. Makes our job a lot easier. I used to have to go look at properties that were, they had three phase powder running to them and everything, and I don’t care anymore because we generate our own power.

Emily Bron: It’s very promising and tell me please, I’m really interested in the international lifestyle. What kind of lifestyle option can you see for the members of your community, especially, young one, what people can do while they’re living in your communities? Retirees? Even they can do something like what kind of professionals coming to your community?

Patrick Heibert: We certainly get a lot of professionals that are able to work from home. I can thank COVID for that. It pretty much taught half the world that you can do your job from home. And, it really increased our market. A lot of companies didn’t even reopen their offices and just kept their, I have lots of friends that are still working from home, whether they’re in Detroit or, Switzerland or wherever they’re working from home.

And so instantly, they’re looking at this as an opportunity I can work there, in a night, a really nice climate. And, we have a lot of check boxes, like I said, on when we pick a location. So we’re near the town of, we’re nine minute drive from the town of Coronado.

It’s got, it’s a, it was the first expat center in Panama. So there’s thousands of expats living there. And of course, then the restaurants and the malls and the movie theaters and all those things are catered to that. So it has all those things. It has three or four golf courses nearby. It’s got lots of beautiful Pacific beaches, beautiful sand, marble sand with white and black.

It’s very beautiful places. Great surfing. And even within our own community, like I said, we have the music studios and we’re at woodworking shops and the, amphitheaters and all of it.

Emily Bron: So it’s part of the plan, yes, of community development plan, yes?

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, exactly.

We, sometimes people say they really like to be isolated far away from everything and everybody, but reality wise, once they do that, they realize that they don’t want to. Good point. So we mix that concept where, you know, Veritas Village Coronado, for instance, is like I said, nine, 10 minutes away from the town.

It feels like you’re out in the middle of nowhere, but you’re very close to everything. Plus within our community, we have so much to do as well.

Emily Bron: So you will have gardening part, like for people who want to cultivate and grow their own vegetables, fruits. Yes.

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, we have fruit orchards.

We, in fact, we just finished. planting another 40 some varieties of fruits on the property. Everything from aloes, to papayas, to bananas, to you name it. We have a star fruit, everything you’d ever can think of. We even have coffee growing there, so you can make your own coffee from the coffee beans. I have little roasters and dryers there.

And then, a large tract of vegetable gardens, so potatoes and carrots and everything, lettuce. And then we actually have hydroponic gardens, which are. Vertical gardens were much more efficient use of space and I’ve been amazed. We’ve been doing a lot of hydroponics lately and I actually have on my deck here.

2 test cases. I have a little hydroponic garden and then I have a. Soil garden. Same plants, exactly planted at the same time. My, my soil garden is half grown and starting to produce some tomatoes and things like that. The hydroponic garden has been producing tomatoes for two or three months.

Beautiful, way better quality organic fruit and vegetables. It’s just I don’t, I didn’t know that about plants to be honest. That they actually seem to prefer just growing in hydroponic in water. And it’s been great, and like I said, it’s vertical, so in terms of, it’s almost like having a condominium for plants, and, it’s a much more dense use of space.

And yeah, the community members get to use all of these facilities, with the vegetables, the orchards, we have a beautiful pathway through the orchards. butterflies and bird gardens and things like that. So it’s very pretty too. And then, the, each person’s lot or people that each of the residents home site is large enough that they can have their own gardens and orchards too.

And so they, they can pick their own and use the community one as well. So there’s lots of food.

Emily Bron: And speaking about the school, I know that the special program, and I even probably will invite once Michael which is leader of this educational program. But are you planning to have building?

I know there is online component for the expat children, and you will have physical location for the local children. Is it correct?

Patrick Heibert: Yeah, we have a physical school on site. It’ll be run by the expat group that already has online schools. So this will actually be their first brick and mortar school and they’re excited about it too.

I like it because it’s got a little bit more of a libertarian non woke style to it. And I also like it because I grew up in the prairies of Canada where, this reminds me of that. Like you’d have field trips and you could go catch minnows in the stream or whatever. Butterflies or, whatever experiments you were doing and, just being part of nature.

So imagine having your school right in a forest and a jungle where you have all that nature beside you and your little field trips are just stepping outside the school. And that’s the way I felt like growing up. And I didn’t realize how lucky I had it compared to a lot of kids that, went to school and currently today in a woke school in a city, it’s a very different education than.

Then what we’re going to have there. So I think the kids that are getting educated and they’ll be ranging from kindergarten to teenagers in high school that, I think their education on, Veritas village community school will be great. And it’ll be, there’ll be students from around there to be, like I said, it’s a very expat oriented area and a lot of the locals too, are like, oh, Like I mentioned up front, one of the beauties of the Latin American culture is extremely family oriented.

The schools down here, if they try to go woke and say we’re going to teach about whatever, transgender stuff or something, it just gets shut down. The families don’t allow it. It’s I wish that was happening in North America a little more, that it would get shut down.

Maybe we wouldn’t have this ridiculousness. Anyway, so I’m really excited about the school and then the clinic, there’s going to be an onsite physical clinic as well with a little bit more, I wouldn’t say it like Eastern medicine necessarily, but a wider range of thoughts of, a lot more holistic medicine kind of thoughts.

Emily Bron: Amazing, amazing. And I believe we, discussed many different topics and it’s still just beginning of the, conversation that people can have around this type of communities. My question, what, Advancements or trends in sustainable living in free city direction and community building you foresee and you’re most excited about.

I know you are being part of, Tripolis and Free City Foundation. As you mentioned, now get the trip looking for the new properties, new places. So what are the trends now?

Patrick Heibert: There’s, I guess there’s a lot of trends. Yeah, this has been an evolution and it will continue to be. I don’t think we’ve hit the pinnacle yet.

We are working with the most freedom and sustainability oriented communities possible within the rules that surround us in the countries. Obviously with Tipolis, I’m working with them too. To be able to create our own roles and our own governance. That’ll be on a whole another level, but like I said, when we first started, I wanted to create a off grid community, a luxury off grid community, because people thought of off grid communities is I’m going to be living in a yurt or a cabin in the forest, and I won’t have any luxuries or anything.

That’s not at all what we’re doing. We’re doing very nice luxury homes with all the amenities you ever wanted. Yeah. It’s just, you’re not paying any power bill because you’re generating your own power. And so those sorts of things continue to grow. And then we added the food forests and things like that.

So now, you’re sustainable from a food perspective. Obviously we’ve had the water from day one, but those sorts of things continue to get better. There’s, changes in technologies that we’re using on the, on different areas. But yeah, I think the next level is. The autonomy, the little bit more governance of, of what we can make rules.

I don’t like we’ve talked a little bit about with Tipliss and Alex and Titus, the, CFO and CEO of that company. And I spend a lot of time talking about where this is going to go. But, that and then, it’s just the different regions. I’m excited about Like we talked about earlier, I know you’re a big fan of Mexico and so am I.

Emily Bron: I will visit Panama Veritas Village with pleasure and I will check maybe some tiny home for me. I’m really excited.

Patrick Heibert: We’d love to have you as a resident in the community. I’m also excited about the Argentina and Costa Rica properties. Obviously Argentina is a unique one. It’s inside a vineyard that produces the grapes for trapeze and container and some of the most famous.

Melbeck wines in the region to, so for people that kind of the idea of maybe I’m going to make my own wines off of grapes that I pick myself in the community, that’s cool because imagine trying to have that property in Napa Valley or the Okanagan Valley in Canada. Those are super expensive places to live, whereas in Argentina now, you have a Libertarian president making lots of great changes, changing the economy around, and, you never know what’s going to happen in the future, but he’s very popular right now, and I expect to be re elected, the country’s doing way better than it was under the previous president.

Regime. We’re excited about that. And every village that we make is a little bit different. So for people that live in one or two or three, or wanna travel around, they, you get the benefit of the, like-minded people you can sit down and have a glass of wine with and enjoy the conversation and not feel like you’re gotta watch what you say.

But you can do it in different environments and it’s very cool.

Emily Bron: So last question, what advice would you give someone interested in transitioning from a city or from any place to eco friendly lifestyle or considering joining your intentional community in different places? How to find and connect with you?

Patrick Heibert: I’ll be honest, whether move into one of our communities or some other place in this region The quality of life is just so much better than most places in the world. The cost of living is so much lower for, the everything you know, pretty much everything you eat is much more organic.

Almost everything grows here. You don’t have, you have an ongoing seasonal growth of everything all year round. There’s so many things to do in these areas cause, and the climate’s always nice enough to do them. I still have a little bit of Canadian in me even after a couple of decades I sometimes go grab a, I go look for my jacket when I’m going to go outside and I forget.

Yeah, I should, by now I should probably not be looking for a jacket. I never need one here. So it’s interesting that some of those things stick in your head from childhood, quality of life the people are amazing. The culture is based on family values. I think that’s enormous.

It impacts every part of your life. It’s just. People are super friendly, obviously you have the oceans and the mountains and the beauty and all the, all that down here, the climate, but just in general cost of living, if you’re smart about it, yeah, you can go to a North American or European style grocery store and spend the same amount on groceries as you would in, somewhere in the States, or you can just go to a market, which is much more interesting anyway and, there’s outdoor markets and all sorts of different types of markets and you’re basically Produce is probably a fifth, if not less, of the cost.

And you can live a better life. I can live a much more fulfilling life down here at a fraction of the cost. And in Panama, if, for, for countries like Canada, not so much for the U. S. at this point but in Canada, your taxes are attached to your residency. As a Canadian, I was able to give up my Canadian residency.

See? I can work in I got my Panamanian, like I said, I have other residencies as well, but in this case with my Panamanian residency, and Panama is a tax jurisdictional area. So basically what that means is if you make your living from funds outside of Panama, it’s zero tax dollars. So if you’re an architect, for instance, and you move down to this area or anything where you can do consulting or any kind of thing that you can make a living off of off of business from outside the country, you can set up a, your own company down here that’s an offshore company and it makes income at a zero tax rate.

And so imagine that, like I went from Canada, which the all in tax rate after, you’ve got your income tax and the different provincial and federal taxes and everything rolled together. I was probably losing conservatively 60 to 65 percent of my paycheck, right? So imagine getting that back and then on top of that having maybe your cost of living as a quarter of what it was.

So now what can you do with your lifestyle? You can, you can do whatever you want. You can travel a lot more. You can do a lot of things. Panama City’s airport is a hub. I’ve got to go speak at a conference in Europe and it’s a direct flight to Amsterdam and direct flights to Madrid and direct flights to Turkey and all over the place.

And they’re very inexpensive. And like I said, it’s a financial capital here. So the banking is, there’s probably 300 different banks in the city. So it, there’s a lot of going for this area. But in general, in Central America, there’s less expensive and more expensive places to live.

But almost everywhere it’s going to be less expensive than here. what people consider a first world country like the U. S. or Europe.

Emily Bron: So finally, for individuals inspired by your work and projects, what would be the first step you’d recommend they take towards joining your community?

Patrick Heibert: You can find, I think you have a page to link them to, maybe you want to put that in.

In your podcast, underneath here, hopefully you can put that link so that people can come to see our website.

Emily Bron: But you have so many options. How would you, in different countries, how would you suggest people start the search?

Patrick Heibert: We, I would first say, go to the website and see what we have for communities.

And there’s lots of contact information on there. All right. We have some great property experts. My wife Andrea is one of them, she’s very responsive, happy to help get on a call with you or on Zoom or something like that and, very happy to help. And not everything, not every place is for everybody.

Some people, like we often have people choose one country over another and I don’t really have a favorite country, they all have their pros and cons. And it really becomes discovery of, the different things that are cool about each country and then. Picking which one is best for you.

Emily Bron: So I believe that soon, and I might help in this regard you would need even your own kind of travel company actually for people to visit. I know that you have some trips, to compare different properties, to connect with different places in Latin America, I understand it’s the next step.

And I believe we will be speaking once in a while again. I will invite you just to, to tell us about progress of your different projects in different countries and probably new projects will come up. Thank you very much. You were very helpful and thank you for your time and all information you provided.

Patrick Heibert: Thank you very much. And like I said, it’s an honor speaking with you, Emily. Every time we get together, it’s been, it’s always fun. Thank you. I love your background story and I really love what you’re doing here, introducing people to another potential lifestyle That’s much nicer. And I’m a big fan of yours, so I appreciate being on your show.

Emily Bron: Thank you very much. We will be in touch and I will promote this conversation and similar conversations for people who I believe in a search and they even don’t know it exist. So I feel it’s my kind of educational responsibility. Thanks a lot and till the next meeting.

You’ve been listening to the age of reinvention, eco living, free cities, and intentional communities. And I am Emily Bron. Thanks to Patrick Heibert for joining us today and sharing his incredible journey from tech entrepreneur to pioneer in the eco community movement. His work is powerful reminder that we can craft the sustainable lifestyles we aspire to with vision, commitment, and community.

If today’s conversation inspired you, visit us at www. emilybron. com slash podcast, my page on the website for more episodes. and resources to help you on your path to conscious living. Remember to follow us on your favorite podcast platform to stay updated on our latest episodes and eco living and intentional community projects progress.

Before we part, let this discussion with Patrick remind us that the future is not something we enter, but create. With every choice and intention, we have the power to share our world for the better. So what will your contribution be? Until next time, keep reinventing. Thank you for listening and farewell.

Patrick Hiebert

Autris – Founder and CEO EcoVillages.Life – Founder and CEO Vida Verde Agroforestry – Founder and CEO Help Them Help Themselves – Charitable Foundation Creator

EcoVillages designs amazing eco friendly communities with luxury minimalist homes and with sustainable orchards and gardens in tropical locations! Whether you’re someone looking for a new lifestyle in a beautiful new tropical beach or highland community, or someone with a land looking to have an incredible destination community designed and developed, EcoVillages is here to help.

And Vida Verde Agroforestry’s teak, avocado and stevia farms allow you to invest through an NFT!

Welcome to the Age of Reinvention, where we explore the fascinating intersections of eco-living, free cities, and intentional communities. I’m Emily Bron, your host.

Today, I’m thrilled to have a genuinely visionary guest, Patrick Hiebert, who is not just dreaming of a greener, more connected world but actively building it. From laying the development foundation of tiny homes to planting the seeds of eco villages in Panama and other Latin American countries, Patrick’s journey is a beacon for everyone seeking to reinvent their relationship with the environment and society.

Patrick Hiebert’s Journey from Tech to Eco Pioneer

Patrick Hiebert started his career as a tech entrepreneur, creating software for oil and gas companies. Originally from Canada, he and his family moved to Latin America over two decades ago, drawn by the warmer climate and affordable land. Patrick initially bought a significant amount of land to build a home but soon realized he had much more than he needed. This led him to sell portions to friends and family, eventually giving birth to his first eco-village in Nicaragua. Today, Patrick is the CEO and co-founder of EcoVillages, with communities in Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, as well as ongoing projects in other Latin American countries.

The CORE Principles: Freedom, Independence, Resilience, Sustainability, Transparency

At the heart of Patrick’s vision for eco villages is the FIRST philosophy, which stands for Freedom, Independence, Resilience, Sustainability, and Transparency. These principles guide every aspect of community life. Patrick emphasizes that being off-grid provides financial freedom, as residents don’t have to worry about utility bills. Moreover, living among like-minded individuals allows for open dialogues without the fear of censorship or cancellation.

Veritas Villages: A Blend of Modern Luxury and Sustainable Living

One of the flagship projects under Hiebert’s guidance is Veritas Village in Coronado, Panama. This community is designed to offer luxury off-grid living without sacrificing modern amenities. Residents enjoy access to private water supplies, community orchards and gardens, livestock, luxurious off-grid homes, and even facilities like music studios, woodworking shops, and gyms. According to Patrick, the beauty of these communities is that they blend the best of both worlds—modern convenience and self-sustaining, eco-sensible living.

Challenges and Innovations in Construction and Community Building

Building these eco-friendly communities comes with its own set of challenges, particularly in the areas of permitting and construction quality. Patrick has dealt with a variety of hurdles, from environmental regulations to ensuring the use of appropriate construction materials for different climates. Ecovillages takes a hands-on approach to these issues, managing construction internally to maintain high-quality standards and ensure that homes are built to last.

Technology in Sustainable Living

Technology plays a crucial role in making these communities self-sustaining. From advanced solar systems to hydroponic gardens, modern technology ensures that residents can live comfortably while minimizing their ecological footprint. Solar power, in particular, has become more efficient and affordable, making it a viable option for powering entire communities off-grid.

A Diverse and Growing Community

The demographic of Patrick’s communities is diverse, ranging from young families to retirees who hail from various countries, including the USA, Canada, Europe, and South America. This mix of residents contributes to a vibrant, multicultural environment where people share common values around sustainability and freedom.

Advancements and Trends in Sustainable Living

Patrick is continuously looking to the future, exploring advancements and trends that can further enhance the sustainability and autonomy of his communities. One exciting development is the creation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) for managing Homeowners’ Associations, which allows for more transparent and democratic decision-making processes. Additionally, Ecovillages is working on new projects in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina, expanding their vision of sustainable, intentional living to new regions.

How to Join and Learn More

For those inspired by Patrick’s work and interested in transitioning to an eco-friendly lifestyle, the first step is to visit the Ecovillages website. Potential residents can explore different communities and contact property experts who can help them find the perfect home.

Conclusion

Patrick Hiebert’s work in sustainable living and intentional communities is paving the way for a new lifestyle that combines modern luxury with eco-sensible living. Whether you’re an eco-enthusiast, a community planner, or someone curious about living intentionally, Patrick’s vision offers a compelling alternative to traditional ways of living. With communities in various stages of development across Latin America, there’s likely a perfect fit for anyone looking to make a change.