Julio Horacio Arguello Lacayo

Real Estate Developer / Investor / Operator

Julio has spent more than twenty years acquiring, designing, developing, and operating residential and hospitality real estate in Spain, Nicaragua, and the United States. Working with local partners, specialist operating teams, and a base of friends-and-family investors, he has developed and sold more than 500 residential units across Madrid, the Costa del Sol, Miami, and Nicaragua.

His work centers on residential hospitality, the practice of layering hotel-grade design, art curation, service, and programming onto residential real estate. Most developers sell a finished building and move on. Julio treats the building as the starting point, then adds the layers that determine how a place is actually experienced: architecture and interiors, art and design, furnishing and styling, staffing and service standards, food and beverage, and branding. The result is a place people remember, return to, and tell others about. 

La Santa María in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua is the fullest expression of that approach. It is a ground-up resort and residences platform he founded and continues to operate, with a 24-room boutique hotel opening in 2027, and it has been covered by Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, Forbes, and USA Today. An earlier project, Villa Baleares, proved the model at single-asset scale. It was designed, developed, and operated as a top-rated Airbnb property before being sold to a private buyer. In Madrid, he is redeveloping a landmark 1860 building on Plaza de la Cebada into a hospitality destination scheduled to open in 2029.

Alongside real estate, Julio is an active angel investor in technology, working with founders in Silicon Valley and Latin America. Through Stanford and the relationships he has built in the Bay Area, he works closely with other investors, sponsors, founders, operators and fund managers, believing the best opportunities are usually found through people rather than processes. He is always interested in meeting founders building something ambitious, and investors who see the same things he does.

Wellness runs through both his life and his work. He trains daily and takes longevity seriously as a practice rather than a subject, and the same conviction shapes what he builds. San Juan del Sur is a place people travel to in order to feel better than they did when they arrived, and the properties he develops are designed around that: light, air, movement, food, water, and time outdoors, treated as design requirements rather than amenities. He believes the most valuable real estate of the next twenty years will be the kind that measurably improves how people experience it.

He treats learning as a discipline rather than an interest. Two decades into his career he continues to participate in executive programs at Harvard Business School, Stanford, Wharton, IESE, and Babson, and he reads and travels with the same intent, on the conviction that the quality of a decision is set long before the decision is made. That habit runs outward as well as in. He invests in founders in part for the pleasure of learning from them, keeps close counsel with people further along than he is, and uses La Santa María as a platform to support the surrounding community in San Juan del Sur.

Julio holds a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences from Bentley University. He divides his time between Miami, Madrid, and San Juan del Sur.