Doug and Charlotte Armstrong spend their winters in el Tigre, in Nuevo Vallarta, and their summers on Lake of the Woods in Ontario.
It is not a compromise between two lives. It is the arrangement, and it is the same one most people who find this site are trying to build.
That is most of why the site exists. They are not describing something they read about.
About Us
Doug and Charlotte Armstrong Puerto Vallarta
About: Doug and Charlotte Armstrong
Puerto Vallarta
Doug
Armstrong
Doug spent thirty-seven years in financial services with Canada Life, formerly Great-West Life, before moving into real estate. What came with him was the part that mattered: knowing how to read a deal, and knowing that the number on the page is rarely the whole story.
Before that, he curled. Three provincial titles, a national championship, and a silver medal at the 1999 Ford World Men's Curling Championship as lead for Jeff Stoughton's team. Curling teaches you to think several shots ahead and to stay calm when the pressure lands. That has turned out to be useful.
He is AMPI certified and works with Fabris Corp. On any purchase here, the negotiating and the paperwork are his.
He is still competitive about most things. Curling, pickleball, golf. The work itself is quieter than that. It is helping people work out what they actually want, and then being honest about whether a place delivers it.
Charlotte
Armstrong
Charlotte started in hospitality, managing for some of the bigger hotel brands. That is where she learned that the details people actually remember are rarely the ones printed in the brochure. Real estate was a short step from there, and she spent more than twenty years in it.
Then she stepped away for a decade to co-found an international peer support and mental health training company, and a non-profit helping families navigate mental health and substance use. That work came down to listening carefully, saying things plainly, and staying in someone's corner while they made a hard decision. She uses all of it now.
She came back because she missed it. Here she works as a real estate agent with Fabris Corp, alongside Doug. She shows homes, sets up the appointments, runs the open houses, makes the videos of the properties for sale, and does most of the talking with clients about the homes themselves. Which means she spends her days in other people's houses, looking at them the way a buyer will. She is a Southern-raised Canadian, which she will tell you explains a few things.
She is not AMPI certified. Doug is, and that is why the negotiating is his.
Buying here asks more of people than buying at home does. Different process, different paperwork, different pace. Charlotte's job is to make that legible, and to be straight with you about whether the place you are looking at is the place you actually want.
How they Work Together
Two halves of the same job
Doug and Charlotte Armstrong Puerto Vallarta.
The line between the two of them is a clean one, and it sits at the negotiation.
Everything up to that point is Charlotte. Showing homes, setting up the appointments, the open houses, the videos, and the long conversations about whether a place is right. Once there is a deal to be done, it is Doug and the in-house lawyer, because Doug is the AMPI-certified one.
In practice that means you will spend your early days with Charlotte, walking neighbourhoods and ruling places out, and your later ones with Doug. Most people find the first half is the one that decides whether they end up happy, and the second half is the one that decides what they pay.
Where Doug and Charlotte fit
Charlotte is a real estate agent with Fabris Corp. She shows homes, sets up appointments, runs open houses, makes the videos of the properties for sale, and talks clients through the homes themselves.
Doug is the AMPI-certified one, so the negotiation is his, and he does it with the firm's in-house lawyer rather than on his own. That is a different arrangement from what most Canadians and Americans are used to, and it is the right way round.
So you get the early part of this with Charlotte, walking through places and ruling them out and working out which part of the bay suits how you actually live. And then the stretch afterwards that nobody warns you about, which is turning a purchase into a life you can run for six months a year.
What the two of them add to a firm that already knows this market is the other side of the trip. They are Canadians who do this themselves, every year, and they have made most of the mistakes available.
Why Doug and Charlotte
work with them
The short answer is that it works as a team rather than as a roof over a set of competing individuals, and that is rarer than it ought to be.
At a lot of firms people work beside each other rather than with each other. Here the knowledge is pooled. When Doug has a question about a building, a street, a developer or a piece of paperwork, there is usually someone in the office who already knows the answer and whose instinct is to tell him. That comes from the leadership, who built it that way on purpose, and it is the thing that made the two of them comfortable before anything else did.
Most of those colleagues are local and Spanish speaking, which matters more to a Canadian buyer than they expect it to. Your questions arrive in English. The answers live in Spanish, with the notary, the developer, the office that holds the file, the person who has been on that street for thirty years. A firm where that happens down the hall rather than over email is a firm where things actually get found out.
Then the lawyer. Being able to ask a question in English, early, and get the answer from someone inside the transaction rather than brought in at the end, is not how most Canadians and Americans are used to buying. It is the difference between understanding what you are signing and trusting that somebody else did.
And pace. Doug tells people to rent a season before they buy anything, which costs him sales he could have had this year. That advice only survives inside a firm that takes the same long view of what a client is worth, and not every firm does.
Working with Fabris Corp
Doug is AMPI certified in Nayarit, works across Nayarit and Jalisco, and does that work with Fabris Corp.
Which firm you buy through matters more here than it does at home. The process is different, the paperwork is different, and most of what protects a foreign buyer in Mexico sits with the people handling the transaction rather than with anything you would recognise from a Canadian closing. So the firm is not a detail on the letterhead. It is a good part of the outcome.
Fabris Corp has been working in real estate in the Banderas Bay area for more than twenty years. The firm does residential and resort development, property management and consulting, and a good deal of its work is with buyers who are not Mexican and are doing this for the first time. That means the legal and regulatory side is handled as part of the job rather than as something you go off and arrange yourself, and the firm keeps an English-speaking lawyer in house for it.
Twenty years is long enough in one market that most of what can go wrong in a purchase here has gone wrong for somebody they know.
Fabris Corp
Why this site exists
A perspective for long-term residents
Almost everything written about this coast is written for people coming for a week. Very little of it is written for someone trying to work out where to spend half of every year, and those are different questions with different answers.
We worked ours out the slow way. Nobody sat us down and told us the things on this site. We found most of them out by being here, some of them by asking people who had been here longer, and one or two of them the expensive way.
The clearest one was the beach. We took a place in Marina Vallarta for a month, surrounded by water on every side, and spent that month taking a cab to go swimming. It taught us something we had not known about ourselves, which is that easy access to the sand was not a nice extra for us, it was the whole thing. We found that out in a rental, which is the only reason it was a cheap lesson.
So this is the version we wish had existed. It will not tell you where to live, because we do not know you yet. It will tell you what to look at, what to ask, and what people usually get wrong, which is most of the work and almost none of what you will find elsewhere.
And Archie
Archie has been going south for years. He did the Arizona winters, in the car, the whole way, and he is a better traveller than either of them.
Mexico started with a family celebration in Cabo that came up at short notice. They drove, with the dog, which was the first time any of them had done Mexico with a dog attached. They found a place that took dogs, near the ocean and next to a dog park, and ended up staying six weeks. Charlotte spent a good part of that in the dog park, talking to Canadians and Americans who had been doing this for years and who all said the same thing, which was that it is easier than you expect.
That settled it. Archie has come every year since.
And he changed where they live. Before Archie came to Puerto Vallarta they stayed on the beach. Once he was coming, they chose el Tigre instead: it takes dogs, it has a dog park, and there is a great deal of ground to walk him on. The beach club is how they kept the sand.
Two things about that choice are worth passing on, because neither is in any listing.
The first is that Charlotte walks him at any hour, morning or late evening, and has never thought twice about it. That was not a small factor.
The second sounds trivial until you have lived it. The streets and sidewalks there are in good repair. In some parts of the bay they are not, and uneven pavement, cracks and broken glass make walking a dog genuinely difficult. You will be out on those sidewalks twice a day, every day, for six months. Walk them yourself before you sign anything.
The vets and the groomers here are good, which is one less thing to worry about.
For the Armstrongs, a dog is a criterion, and for them it outranked living on the beach. Whatever yours is, work it out before you start looking, because it will decide more than you think it will.
If you are somewhere near the beginning of this, start with the guide. If you are further along and want to talk it through purchasing a property, that is what the contact page is for.
If you are somewhere near the beginning of this, start with the guide.
If you are further along and want to talk it through, that is what the contact page is for.