Our Journey to the Dominican Republic

As my wife Robin and I start our transition to full time residency in the Dominican Republic many of our friends and family want to know how we did it and what the process has been like so I thought it may make an interesting read for someone who is also considering the Caribbean life for themselves.
We had made up our minds several years ago that we would retire “south of the border” but until this year we had not really zeroed in on where that would be. We of course looked at all of the usual places with the mindset that the “world is our oyster” and there was no place off the table from consideration. After doing extensive research through groups like International Living, doing research on the internet and YouTube as well as joining message boards like Expat.com we slowly began eliminating locales from your list. Honduras, Chile, Mexico, Panama, Belize, Costa Rica, etc. Some were eliminated because of crime rate/cartels and some just because we felt like it has been too “discover” and or has been overpriced for what we wanted. Slowly we whittled the list down for one reason or another to just a couple of contenders. Eventually we landed on the idea of the Dominican Republic.
Once we had decided that the DR was where we thought we wanted to be we started looking at the different towns and locations that seemed appealing to us. We know we wanted to like in a coastal community and after looking at Punta Cana, Sosua and few other locations we decided that the town of Las Terranas met many of our requirements. One of the biggest being that it has a stable population of expats rather than having the transitory “spring breakers” and snow bird residents where in our opinion you didn’t really get a chance to develop a sense of community yet was still large enough to have the level of services and infrastructure that makes life in a developing country much more bearable.

We went down to Las Terranas in mid-March of this year with the mindset that we were going to purchase our retirement home while we were down there. This didn’t quite work out the way we had expected, it actually turned out much better than hoped.  Prior to going to Las Terranas we had been in touch with two wonderful people, a husband and wife realtor team Helen Mitchell and Doug Barker at Beachtown Property ( www.beachtownproperty.com ). They spent time listening to what we wanted and took us to several places on the Samana Peninsula to look at. After a few days we found and fell in love with a piece of land on top of a hill located in the Bella Vista ( http://bellavistalasterrenas.com )community with an absolutely spectacular 200-degree view of the ocean.

Before committing to purchase the land, I wanted to make sure that we would be able to build our dream home within our budget. So Helen negotiated a price with the property owner and talked him into reserving the lot so that we could do some further research. Doug, suggested several architects that he had worked with in the past and after meeting one at his office and looking at his past work we decided to engage Pablo at SCP Architects in Las Terranas to come up with a high level price list of what could be built within our budget constraints. Up to this point we had spent nothing out of pocket.
Towards the end of our week in Las Terranas we knew that we would be doing a land purchase deal so we engaged with an Attorney at the very well respected Guzman Ariza law firm to both give Helen our power of Attorney for the real estate purchase and to have him do the due diligence and close the sale on of the property on our behalf.  The cost for this was minimal and gave us the ability to have Helen work as our agent while we are back in the United States. 

We are now back at our home in the United States and have received the cost of building our dream home and have decided to move forward with the acquisition of the land and to have our Architect proceed with creating a detailed set of plans for our review when we are back in the DR at the end of June. When we will also be starting our paperwork for our pensionato status, I will update this as things progress and let you know how it goes.

For anyone thinking about moving to the DR or any other country my advice is for you to first be honest with yourself as to what you want from your new home and can it realistically provide that to you. After that then you need to develop a list of your criteria and begin seeing what places best meet those. At the end of the day you are going to need to rely on strangers to help you make your dream come true, do as much research on them as possible to make you feel comfortable but eventually you are going to take a leap of faith and put your trust with someone.