Caribbean Property Scams: A Due Diligence Checklist
by Wiso
Caribbean property scams are rarely cinematic. The expensive version is a normal-looking reservation, a friendly closer, and a wire that leaves your account before anyone has checked who owns the land.
This is general information, not legal advice. A lawyer who practices in the Dominican Republic should run the file on the specific property. The checklist below is the set of mistakes that show up after the money is gone. It is not a substitute for the registry work itself.
Five mistakes that cost more than a bad view
| Mistake | What people tell themselves | What it actually costs |
|---|---|---|
| No controlled payment path | “The agent said to wire the seller so we don’t lose the unit.” | Recovery depends on suing, often across borders, for funds you released too early |
| Unverified deslinde | “The plot is obvious. The survey can wait.” | You may have paid for a slice of a larger parcel that is not separately titled |
| Hidden closing line-items | “The price on the offer is the price.” | Transfer tax, notary, registration, legal fees, and association clearance were never in the headline |
| Seller does not match the registry | “They have a deed PDF and the keys.” | You negotiate with someone who cannot transfer what they are selling |
| A yield or a tax exemption sold as fact | “Confotur and 10% are included.” | You priced a benefit the project does not have, or a rent roll that was a spreadsheet |
Paying the wrong account, too early
Dominican closings are not a copy of a US title-company escrow. That absence is not an invitation to wire the purchase price to a seller’s personal account, or to a promoter, because a WhatsApp message said the reservation expires tonight. The controlled path is written: your lawyer, a notary’s fiduciary arrangement, or another account your counsel names, releasing funds only when the conditions in the contract are met. Those conditions include a seller who matches the registry and a property that is the property you walked.
Reservation deposits need the same discipline at a smaller size. Know who holds the deposit, whether it is refundable, and what “refundable” requires you to prove. A deposit that converts into a gift the moment you ask a question is not a holding fee. It is the first installment of a mistake.
The sequence a careful foreign buyer actually follows — counsel, documents, money — is sketched in the practical buying guide. Use it as the order of operations, not as a slogan about how easy ownership is.
An unverified deslinde
A deslinde is the cadastral process that individualizes a parcel: boundaries, area, and a plan the registry can tie to a certificate. It matters most with land, with a lot inside a larger parent parcel, and with any sale where the “unit” is a line on a master plan rather than an existing title. Buying before that work is finished can mean you paid for a piece that cannot yet be transferred on its own.
Do not accept a survey sketch from the seller as the deslinde. Ask your lawyer what the registry and the cadastre currently show, and whether a deslinde is complete, in process, or absent. If the answer is “in process,” the price and the payment schedule have to reflect that you do not yet have a separable title. Walking the corners with a salesperson does not complete the file.
Closing costs that were never on the offer
The number in the listing is not the number that leaves your account. Budget, with documents rather than folklore, for the property transfer tax, notary and registration charges, your lawyer, any association certificate of no debt, utility balances, and — if the sale is “turnkey” — a furniture inventory you have actually seen. The transfer tax is not automatically 3% of the asking price. The cases and the IPI threshold are in the tax note. Put those lines on a closing statement before you agree a price, and treat any “waiver” that is not in the contract as a story.
Developer add-ons deserve a second look: furniture packages you cannot decline, club memberships, and a “closing coordination” fee that appeared after the reservation. If it is not in the contract you signed, it is a new negotiation, not an inevitability.
A deed PDF is not a title check
People lose money selling property they do not own: an heir who has not completed succession, a spouse whose consent is required, a company whose representative lacks authority, a seller whose certificate has annotations they hoped you would not order. The fix is procedural. Order the registry status, read who is named, and read the annotations. How a Certificación de Estado Jurídico fits into that order of documents is the point of the title verification guide. Do that work before the large wire, not after a notary has started a closing you are afraid to pause.
Off-plan adds a cousin of the same mistake. You are not buying a certificate that already exists. You are buying a promise that a unit title will exist. The contract has to say what you hold in the meantime and what happens to payments if it never does.
Guaranteed rent and a tax holiday that is not yours
“Ten percent net” and “Confotur, so you pay nothing” are sales sentences. A rental guarantee is only as strong as the company promising it, the term, and the conditions under which they can stop paying. Read the guarantee as a credit risk. Separately, rebuild the yield from invoices, using the same expense stack you would use if nobody had promised you anything.
Confotur is a project-level incentive with a process, not a sticker the agent can apply to any apartment. What it is, what it is not, and which questions to ask before you reserve are in the Confotur note. If the exemption is why the price makes sense, the resolution and the lawyer’s confirmation are part of the price. A sentence in a brochure is not.
A file you can close without heroics
Before the payment that would hurt, you should be able to name: the account that will hold funds, the person on the certificate, the status of the deslinde if the parcel is not already individualized, every closing line that is not the purchase price, and whether any tax benefit or rent promise exists outside the marketing PDF. Missing any one of those is a reason to wait. The unit that “will not be here tomorrow” is a smaller loss than funds you cannot call back.
Imagery & Architectural Visualizations:
Architectural renderings, project photography, and master plans are presented for illustrative and editorial purposes. All rights and copyrights remain with their respective developers, architects, and creators. For image attribution or inquiries: legal@wiso.do
