Corporate Restructuring in the Dominican Republic

The Law That Keeps a Dominican Company from Closing Over a Bad Year: Corporate Restructuring in the DR A hotel chain ends the season with payroll in arrears and suppliers unpaid. The instinct is to close. But since 2015, Dominican law has offered an alternative that many companies, and their lawyers, still do not know […]

Forming a Bien de Familia Over Dominican Property

Putting the Home Beyond Reach: Forming a Bien de Familia Over Dominican Property Asset protection does not always require offshore structures. Dominican law has offered families a domestic shield for nearly a century: the bien de familia, a regime under which a home, once formally constituted as such and registered, becomes as a rule unseizable […]

Registering a Mortgage in the Dominican Republic

The Queue Is the Contract: Registering a Conventional Mortgage in the Dominican Republic Strip away the paperwork and a mortgage is a claim to a place in line. The conventional mortgage, granted by contract over registered property, entitles its holder, if the debt goes unpaid, to pursue the property and collect from its price with […]

Civil Partition of Dominican Real Estate Property

From Shares to Parcels: Registering the Civil Partition of Dominican Property Co-ownership is easy to enter and famously hard to inhabit. Heirs receive a succession and become co-owners of everything in it; a divorced couple’s community dissolves into shares; partners acquire together and later want apart. In each case the law’s starting point is indivision: […]

Donation of Dominican Real Estate

Giving Property Away, Properly: The Registered Donation of Dominican Real Estate The most common estate plan in the Dominican Republic is not a document; it is a decision parents make at a kitchen table, to give the property to the children now, while everyone is alive to see it. The instinct is sound: donation moves […]

Dation in Payment at the Dominican Title Registry

Paying With the Property Itself: The Dation in Payment at the Dominican Title Registry Every debt is a promise of money, but not every debtor ends up with money. When the cash is gone and the creditor is real, Dominican practice reaches for one of the oldest instruments of honorable exit: the dación en pago, […]

Transfer of Dominican Property by Cause of Death

The Inheritance Is Not Yours Yet: The Transfer of Dominican Property by Cause of Death Dominican law transmits estates at the instant of death: legally, the heirs succeed the deceased immediately, in everything. The registry obeys a different clock. The day after the funeral, and the decade after, in thousands of families, the certificates of […]