From One Building to Many Owners: Constituting the Condominium Regime in the Dominican Republic Every apartment sold in the Dominican Republic exists twice: once as concrete, and once as a legal object created by paperwork most buyers never read. A building is, by default, a single property with a single title. What converts it into […]
Gathering the Pieces of a Parcel: The Consolidation of Constancias Anotadas A great deal of Dominican land is owned in fractions of somebody else’s parcel. The constancia anotada, the document evidencing rights over an undetermined portion of a parcel, without its own individualized survey, is the legacy of decades of informal subdivision: parents distributing land […]
Buying the Loan, Not the Property: Registering an Assignment of Credit in the Dominican Republic There is a second market beneath the Dominican property market: the market for the debts secured by it. Banks sell loan portfolios, investors buy distressed credits at a discount, private lenders exit positions, and estates liquidate the mortgage credits a […]
“I Lost My Title”, What Losing the Title Duplicate Means in the Dominican Republic, and What to Do Today It is one of the most frequent calls a Dominican real estate lawyer receives, and it always carries the same undertone of panic: the title is gone. Lost in a move, destroyed in a flood, missing […]
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, […]
The Long Road: The Ordinary Real Estate Foreclosure in the Dominican Republic Every legal system has a default, and in Dominican real estate execution the default is the ordinary foreclosure of the Civil Procedure Code: the full-dress procedure, inherited from the French tradition, through which a creditor armed with an enforceable title seizes, advertises and […]
Amending the Building’s Constitution: The Modification of the Condominium Regime A condominium’s founding documents are drafted at a moment, and buildings outlive moments. The developer’s master plan adds a phase the original declaration never described; owners want to convert a commercial ground floor to residential use, or the reverse; common areas are reconfigured, units merged […]
The House on Someone Else’s Land: Registering Improvements in Favor of a Third Party Walk through any Dominican town and you will see the legal situation this procedure exists for: the house a son built on his mother’s parcel, the second floor a sister added over the family home, the business a nephew raised on […]
Ownership on Layaway: The Conditional Sale of Dominican Real Estate Dominican law offers installment sellers two philosophies of protection. The firstcovers the transfer ownership now and secure the unpaid price with a privilege or mortgage, the buyer owns, the seller holds security. The second inverts the architecture entirely: the conditional sale (venta condicional de inmuebles), […]
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