Let The Buyer Beware

From a Honolulu correspondent

Hawaii residents, who have so far bought a total of 2,500 blocks of subdivided land in the New Hebrides, 3,500 miles south-west of here, have been warned to be cautious in buying or investing in the condominium.

The warning is made in a long series of articles in the Honolulu Advertiser by staff writer I. F. Cunningham, who went to the New Hebrides especially to look into land deals there. Cunningham warns that anybody who wants to live on one of the subdivisions has to have capital, an outside income, manual skills, and

“something of a pioneer spirit and a willingness for relative isolation”.

He says the days of laissez faire and subdividing on easy entry to the condominium appear over because of new regulations made to protect the interests of the New Hebrideans. And the situation can be expected to become tougher.

The newspaper in an editorial com menting on Cunningham’s reports says the possibilities for easy living and maybe easy profits in the New Hebrides appear to have been over sold. The New Hebrides was “not necessarily some new Hawaii, or even some new Fiji, a country where tourism is booming but also one where land sales are getting a hard look from the now-independent Fiji Government”.

It adds, “Those who invest in the New Hebrides, large or small, might well take the attitude they are not buying paradise, the islands and people, or some automatic right to big profits on land speculation. And that is as it should be”.

The Hawaii Government in late August suspended sales and advertis ing of New Hebrides subdivisions in Hawaii pending a review of recent New Hebrides sales and immigration regulations. The review is still under way. Cunningham said large-scale American settlement on New Heb rides sub-divided land did not seem imminent—he was able to find only three families, all from Hawaii, who had transplanted themselves.