The sleepy village of Moira, 5 km north of Goa’s capital Panaji, is all set to come alive with an attractive new occupant. Calcutta girl Celina Jaitley, one of the newer faces to climb the celebrity bandwagon that’s buying property in Goa, is busy remodelling an old villa she bought in February.

Goa shed its image of a one-horse pensioner’s paradise a while ago. But it now seems as if everybody wants a piece of Goa — from the writer to the actor to the executive. Swathes of land are being sold at a price to suit almost every pocket and the best of places are being reserved for the rich and the famous.

Authors Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh have both zeroed in on parts of Goa. Seth is said to be scouting around for a suitable house there, while Ghosh recently bought a property in Aldona in north Goa. Delhi cardiologist Naresh Trehan’s monumental laterite mansion Coca la-la, complete with lawns and gazebos behind a seven-foot wall, can hardly be missed on the touristy Calangute beach in north Goa. Television personality Prannoy Roy has a beachside property of about 15,000 square metres in Calangute.

“The older non-Goans are fading. Nobody quite takes them seriously,” says Goan architect Gerard da Cunha. And da Cunha — who designs luxury houses for the rich and the famous with costs that run into a few crores of rupees — should know. One of his celebrity clients is Trehan.

Goa, with its sand and sea, has always held a lure for non-Goans. Now with the stock market boom, the upper crust — especially those from the metros where real estate costs more — is buying property in Goa as a holiday getaway.

“GOA allows me to reflect, travel inwards,” says film-maker Saeed Mirza, who bought a house in the state over a decade ago. “Right from the days of the hippies, it has always been some kind of a Shangri-la. But within 10 or 15 years, it will be hellish,” he adds.

Michael Lobo, publisher of Homes and Estates, a real estate magazine in Goa, who also offers consultancy in home building, says 10 per cent of his 75 per cent non-Goan clientele are Indian celebrities. “Of the rest, 30 per cent are NRIs and the others are foreigners,” he says.

Among the celebrity estate owners is Bina Ramani, who recently moved house from Candolim, about 20 km from Panaji, to the neighbouring and very happening Calangute. Sale deed records show that the Calangute property was bought for Rs 12 lakh.

Though prices are high in some of the tony ends of Goa, houses can be bought for Rs 10 lakh or less. More and more people are buying houses in interior villages, where land is cheaper. According to sale deed records, Jaitley’s house cost her Rs 10 lakh, not enough to buy a studio apartment in Mumbai’s western suburbs.

While the going rate for apartments in the beach belt is anything from Rs 4,000 to Rs 5,000 per square foot, an old ancestral villa in the villages would come for Rs 2,500-6,000 a square foot, says Lobo. And for those wishing to head south, land is 20 to 30 per cent cheaper.

Saeed Mirza’s 1,800-sq-foot beachside apartment in north Goa cost him only Rs 11.5 lakh a decade ago. But in the last couple of years, prices have shot up. Delhi designer Tarun Tahiliani who bought a house at Nerul village in north Goa says real estate costs have risen six times since he bought his place a year ago.

With real estate raking in big bucks, anybody, from taxi drivers to lawyers or even doctors, now doubles as an agent. John de Britto, a doctor who turned builder 20 years ago, lists among his clients Indian companies, Mauritius-based offshore companies and Mumbai stars. “It’s a fashionable thing,” he says.

So much is the demand for beachside property that Divya Kapur, a lawyer from Bangalore who started Litterati — a bookshop off the Calangute beach — had to erect a board in her garden to announce that the place was not for sale.

Litterati, spread over part of an ancestral house, is one of the places frequented by the swish set. Once a month, the book club that meets at Litterati sees celebrities such as designer Wendell Rodricks and Saeed Mirza, together with a dozen-odd western expatriates, discussing books and films.

But unlike one Mumbai actor known to come with a cavalcade of bikes, not all celebrities scream for attention. Cricketer Sachin Tendulkar is a quiet and regular visitor at Martinâ’s Corner, a popular restaurant in Benaulim (south Goa), where he lives when he is in the state. In the evenings, Mirza loves to retire to a tiny beachside shack, Peter’s Bar and Restaurant, where he can watch “dolphins doing a private dance.”

In Benaulim, the writer-academic couple, Sudhir Kakkar and Katharina, scrupulously avoid inviting or getting invited by the locals. “We do not want to get distracted from our writing,” says Kakkar.

Locals across the board are far from happy about what they see as a possible invasion. “Goa is too small a place for so many people. It is changing each day and I fear it is becoming a metro,” says designer Rodricks.

Floriano Lobo, general secretary of Goa Suraj, a political party, and Celina Jaitley’s neighbour, says, “Anybody is free to purchase property and live in whatever style, as long as they adhere to the village norms.”

A house for Jaitley will, clearly, come with its share of baggage. And not everybody is rejoicing.