Foreign-Owned Property and Dominican Succession Law: The Rules That Apply When the Owner Dies A Canadian dies in Toronto owning a villa in Las Terrenas. Whatever her will says, and whatever Canadian law provides, the fate of that villa runs through Dominican succession law, because for real estate on Dominican soil, the location of the […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
Dominican Citizenship by Descent: How Children of Dominicans Can Claim a Second Passport Thousands of people born in New York, Madrid or Toronto carry a right they have never exercised: a claim to Dominican citizenship. If your mother or father is Dominican, the Dominican Constitution treats you as Dominican by birth, you do not apply […]
Retire in the Dominican Republic: The Pensionado and Rentista Residency Program Explained A monthly pension of US$1,500 or US$2,000 in passive income, is the entry ticket to one of the Caribbean’s most generous residency programs. The Dominican Republic’s special regime for retirees (pensionados) and rentiers (rentistas) grants qualifying applicants permanent residence on an accelerated track, […]
A Roof Guaranteed by Law: Constituting a Right of Use Over Dominican Property Between letting someone live in your property informally and giving them a full usufruct lies a figure Dominican practice underuses: the right of use (derecho de uso). Drawn from the Civil Code, it grants its holder the right to use another’s property, […]
Mine, Not Ours: The Declaration of Separate Property in Dominican Marriages Dominican law’s default marital regime, the community of property, comes with a powerful presumption: what is acquired during the marriage belongs to both spouses. It is a fair default and a dangerous one, because not everything acquired during a marriage is actually community property. […]
Bien de Familia: How to Make Your Dominican Home Seizure-Proof and Inheritance-Tax Exempt Any individual may incorporate, for their own benefit or that of their heirs at law or their spouse, an unseizable real estate property that will be called Family Property (“Bien de Familia” in Spanish). Among the advantages of the real estate property […]
Arthur & Castillo. All Rights Reserved.