Why the Dominican Republic? 

Here are just a few reasons!

The September 21, 1998 issue of Forbes BusinessMagazine said "The Dominican Republic set out in the early 1990s to remake itself, reform its government, modernize its institutions and open its economy. Now just a few years later, a new generation of leaders has determined that the Dominican Republic can change and compete in the global economy of the 21st century". Foreign direct investment has grown since 1993, from US $91 million to an estimated $624 million in 1997, and it is still growing.  Over the past three years, it rose from $1.023 billion in 2005 to $1.183 billion in 2006 and to $1.393 billion in 2007. Wise investors have started to take notice.

The lure of the Dominican Republic is not just about beautiful beaches, crystal clear water, luxurious tropical breezes and all of the other things that come to mind when conjuring images of the Caribbean.  In fact, many other places you can name do in fact offer the same.  So, what is so special about the Dominican Republic?  In short, it is still one of most affordable places for tourists and for real estate investors alike.  Tax free banking, property taxes so low they are almost non existant, the ability to live very comfortably on less than $2,000 per month ~ make the Dominican Republic the undiscovered paradise.  

Christopher Columbus did not discover America, he discovered the Dominican Republic!  In fact, he liked it so much, he decided to stay.  The odd thing is, Europeans have been coming ever since, but with less than 20% of the tourists coming from the US, it remains a undiscovered "secret" for Americans and Canadians.  Are there other beautiful places in the Caribbean?  Sure there are, but not as inexpensive or offering so much for both the investor and retiree.  

High tax-free interest on your US dollar investments, one of the fastest growing countries & economies, pleasant year-round climate, the opportunity for a tax free business, and very modern health care facilities are only a part of the attraction.

Please read the following recent articles:

The Wall Street Journal:

"Trying to Be the New St. Barts;  Celebrities overtake backpackers on the Dominican Republic's North Coast"

By MARTIN EDLUND
SPECIAL TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SAMANA, Dominican Republic -- The Dominican Republic's Samana Peninsula is dominated by electric-blue waters and bleached white beaches. It's also showing signs of rapid development: Swathes of freshly dug earth mark new resort and marina sites.
For many travelers, a vacation in the Dominican Republic involves a stay at one of the sprawling resorts at Punta Cana, on the east coast. But as the country tries to expand its tourism economy, the focus is now on the north coast.
Just a few years ago, adventurous travelers returned with stories of windswept backpacker huts and beaches there too polluted for swimming. Now, celebrities such as Brad Pitt have been spotted looking at properties for sale. Designer villas with private beaches and putting greens are being rented out for $2,500 a night. Next month, a new airport will open for charter flights and private jets.

The speed of change in the north underscores how rapidly backpacker havens are now being discovered, and then transformed by developers into luxury resorts. It also highlights tourism's effect on the divide between rich and poor in the Caribbean. It's particularly stark here in the Dominican Republic, which borders Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

But at a time when the region is undergoing a big expansion of luxury resorts, from Grand Cayman to Turks and Caicos, tourism experts are asking whether the pace of new building is ultimately sustainable.
More than 3.69 million tourists visited the Dominican Republic last year, with four million visitors estimated this year. Along the north coast, developments are springing up to capture some of the influx. In the town of Puerto Plata, $30 million was spent cleaning beaches polluted by sewage and dredging up fresh white sand. Down the coast in Cabarete -- an area that's long attracted laid-back kite-surfers, due to the high-speed winds off the ocean -- hip restaurants line the main strip near new luxury condominiums. Further down on the Samana Peninsula, the first of four five-star resorts operated by Spanish hotel company Bahia Principe open next month, complete with heliports and beachside villas.

President Leonel Fernandez has been courting Hollywood, even having stars like Robert De Niro over to the presidential palace for lunch. Ten feature films have been shot in the country in the last few years, says Eddie Martinez, Minister for Economic Trade and Development for the Dominican Republic, including "The Good Shepherd" (starring Mr. De Niro, Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon) and "The Lost City" (featuring Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray). Next month, Puerto Plata will host its second annual Dominican International Film Festival, which will draw actors like Vin Diesel.

One of the best examples of the changing face of the north coast is Casa Colonial, a five-star boutique hotel near Puerto Plata. Attendants in safari hats welcome guests, who pay anywhere from $260 to $1,000 a night for the penthouse where Donatella Versace stayed soon after it opened in 2004. A floor-to-ceiling mirror, moved in for her visit, still stands in the room.

It was a challenge convincing travelers that there was a quality boutique hotel in the Dominican Republic, says Roberto Cavoli, who has worked in the local hotel business for more than 15 years and operates Casa Colonial with his wife, Sarah Garcia, an architect who also designed the hotel. To help establish a market, the property got five-star certification from the Small Luxury Hotels of the World brand. Now, the area is going the right way, Ms. Garcia says: "High-end bohemian."

Around six years ago, developers started buying cheap land in the north and building villas. "In the last three years, there must be close to two dozen scattered between Puerto Plata and Cabrera," says Jason Matthews, who manages 10 properties through North Coast Management, a villa rental company with offices in the Dominican Republic and the U.S. For $20,000 a week Mr. Matthews rents out his own property, Castellamonte, a 15,000-square-foot Spanish-style villa with eight bedrooms, hand-painted murals on the ceilings and a putting green.

Soon, villas in the area will be joined by the Bahia Principe all-inclusive five-star resorts. The north coast tried this approach once before, building all-inclusive resorts with loans from the Dominican Central Bank in the 1970s. But many were cheaply made, say locals. The new ones will include plenty of luxury perks. The Bahia Principe resort at Cayo Levantado, a tiny, picturesque island where Bacardi filmed its commercials, will have a heliport and beach villas with private, open-air Jacuzzis looking out to the sea.

More change is expected around Samana when 75 cruise ships, including Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Line, are expected to dock this season, up from 45 last season.

This is putting pressure on some locals to keep pace with the market or sell out to someone who will. When Windsurf Resort owner Gordon Gannon bought the hotel in Cabarete in 1992, its 36 rooms had no telephones, air conditioning, or television. Since then, he's spent more than $1 million on upgrades. There are now 60 rooms, with 120 more in the works, crammed with modern amenities. "What used to be luxury items are now standard," he says.

There are risks to targeting such an upscale market. Affluent travelers "think that they have all the answers themselves, so trying to convince them on new product, a new destination, is a challenge," says Gary Sain, Chief Marketing Officer and Partner of YPB&R, a travel marketing firm that recently published a study of travelers with household incomes above $200,000.

The north coast is still far from reaching critical mass with travelers. When Bill Supan, a building contractor from Longview, Texas, told friends he was planning a trip to the Dominican Republic, they were wary. "Our friends asked 'where is that? Are they fighting there?' " says Mr. Supan.

On a recent eight-day trip with his wife, Mr. Supan mingled with the locals, driving to little coastal towns and shopping. "It is not a destination that is on the tip of everybody's tongue like a St. Thomas might be," he says. "I can't wait to get back home and start showing pictures."

The Dominican Republic Offers a New Place in the Sun   

I WAKE up in my golden-yellow Oscar de la Renta-decorated, $650-a-night villa, throw off the 350-thread-count sheets, and pad over to open the balcony doors. In floods the Caribbean sunlight, nothing but a long-fronded palm and a patch of manicured grass between me and the sugary sand beach, which gives way to water a shade of aquamarine that I thought had existed only in Crayola boxes. It’s as if I had woken up in a travel brochure ... or a Corona commercial. But really, it’s just morning in Tortuga Bay, the new luxury resort on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic.

My old friend Jon is also up, already fantasizing about his golf game on the P. B. Dye-designed oceanfront course (and, yes, there’s the seventh hole, jutting out into the sea just to my left). It’s a significant change from his dusty jaunts through the public courses of eastern Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, I am preparing myself for the salt-scrubbing, Oriental-massaging experience of a $247 Energizing Day Package at the Six Senses Spa, the high-end Asian chain previously only available at destinations like Phuket and the Maldives, where it takes a $247 massage just to recover from your 20-plus hour flight. (Tortuga Bay is just a three-and-a-half-hour flight from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York).

But first, breakfast. Sure, just pressing “2” on our direct-to-butler cell phone would summon a feast to the aforementioned balcony, but we’re guys who prefer the high-end gluttony of the breakfast buffet combined with made-to-order omelets and pancakes at the poolside Bamboo Restaurant. It’s just a two-minute walk away. (Still, we take our golf cart.)

Just another day in paradise.

But great as Tortuga Bay might sound (and some service glitches over the course of our stay made me question just how great it was), this resort, with 50 suites in 15 villas, is just one of a number of high-end getaways that are beginning to call the Dominican Republic home. The Sanctuary Cap Cana, a boutique hotel with eight restaurants within a larger $500 million development, has a low-key opening scheduled for Feb. 1; before then, Jack Nicklaus will be flying in to open one of his Signature golf courses, with nine of the holes on the water. Farther up the east coast, through picturesque hills and small towns, the Sivory resort, with its 55 terra-cotta-colored suites built into jungle-worthy vegetation (lushness reduced near the suites to avoid bugs) — some right on the beach with their own private plunge pools — is gearing up for its first full winter season.

Time was the Dominican Republic was famous for its bargain getaways: $1,000 for a flight-included, all-inclusive resort where the food was passable, the drinks strong and the merengue music festive. (Actually, that time was only a year or two ago, and the bargains are still there.) But the country is increasingly becoming the five-star playground of the Caribbean, pulling in tourists that might otherwise have gone to Jamaica, Puerto Rico or St. Thomas and gearing up to give the glamour spots of Anguilla, St. Bart’s and Turks and Caicos a run for their money.

As the winter season approaches, the Dominican Republic has all but been anointed with “it-destination” status by celebrities, travel magazines and tour operators. It’s estimated that four million people will visit the country this year. That’s more than double the 1.9 million that came in 1996. And though Canadians and Europeans were the traditional visitors, Americans are fast taking over.

With thousands of pricey hotel rooms and luxury second homes planned for the next decade, and paparazzi-drawing celebrities like the Clintons, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Julio Iglesias, Vin Diesel and Brad Pitt popping in for work or play or both, this is only the beginning. The Roco Ki real estate venture will open the Westin Roco Ki Beach and Golf Resort in Punta Cana in winter 2007, and is planning at least seven high-end hotels, in a resort that gives a nod to the Ta?no Indians who lived on the island before Columbus arrived. (It financed an archaeological dig on its land before beginning construction and is considering opening a museum nearby with the findings.) It is also a residential community: there was $100 million in sales the day those homes went on the market in April 2005, according to Nick Tawil Fernandez, the chief executive officer.

Cap Cana has about 30,000 acres south of Tortuga Bay, and villas are on sale from $750,000; in addition to the Sanctuary Cap Cana, its marina, whose debut is this December, will eventually have 1,000 slips. And it’s not just on the east coast that all this action is taking place: in Saman?, the paradisiacal peninsula on the north coast visited by humpback whales, the Gran Bah?a Pr?ncipe chain is opening no less than four five-star hotels for the winter season.

And there is much near-virgin beach still being scoured: Fernando Rainieri, a former tourism secretary and the brother of the Punta Cana pioneer Frank Rainieri, is part of a group of Dominican investors that includes the wealthy Najri family, that bought some beachfront land in 1997 in Miches, the largely undeveloped area between the resorts of Saman? and Punta Cana. They’ve recently been negotiating with a group of American and Canadian investors. (Howard Kerzner, whose company owns the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas and many others, recently died in a helicopter crash on his way to scout out land in the north.)

How did a country that three decades ago few people considered a beach destination become such an A-list destination?

BEACHES The hundreds of miles of sandy shore, much of it seemingly typecast for the role of Paradise, beats every other Caribbean nation but Cuba for length; especially on the east end, the fine white sand and turquoise waters match up for quality as well.

GOLF Fazio, Nicklaus, Dye, they’ve all been there, designed that. (There are more than 20 designer golf courses in use or planned.)

FLIGHTS With five international airports taking in more than a dozen daily nonstop flights from New York City and direct service being offered from an ever-increasing number of other American cities, it’s easy to get there. A contributing factor: New York’s enormous Dominican immigrant community flies back and forth regularly, creating year-round demand and thus increasing options.

THE COCOON EFFECT Tourism in the Dominican Republic has long been all-inclusive. And although many of the new high-end resorts are not, they do provide the same kind of get-away-from-it-all experience travelers in escape mode are often looking for.

POOR INFRASTRUCTURE The Dominican Republic’s notoriously bad (and badly marked) roads, dysfunctional power grid and dubious water system had a hand in driving the all-inclusive culture by making it necessary for resort owners to provide a self-sustaining community and thus a huge disincentive to explore the otherwise culturally rich island, home to everything from merengue to Christopher Columbus’s first settlement in the New World.

BASEBALL As Dominican baseball superstars like Pedro Mart?nez, Sammy Sosa, Manny Ram?rez and Albert Pujols became household names in the United States over the last decade, their country of origin did too.

CELEBRITIES It’s hard to imagine anyone who has brought more boldface names to the Dominican Republic than the designer Oscar de la Renta. To cite one prominent example, he got Hillary Clinton to visit Punta Cana in 1998, and she and Bill have been going back every since. Producing a Miss Universe, Amelia Vega, in 2003, didn’t hurt either.

GOVERNMENT EFFORTS The government played a key role in providing tax breaks and other support for the first round of all-inclusive resorts that sprouted in the 1980’s. These days, the secretary of tourism, F?lix Jim?nez, has a $30 million promotional budget, and through the public relations firm BVK has been blitzing New York and other cities with its Republic of Colors campaign.

TERRORISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM The Dominican Republic doesn’t have them — or tsunamis — making it an attractive substitute for those fearful of seeking luxury in Thailand, Indonesia, Egypt and the like. “Dominicans are not anti-anything,” said Ellis P?rez, a vice president of Cap Cana and a former secretary of tourism. “We are an open, simple people.”

According to Mr. Jim?nez, tourists spent $14 millon in the country in 1974; in 2005 his government placed the figure at $3.5 billion. In 1986 just over half a million people visited the country. In 1996, it was over 1.5 million. And beyond the four million expected this year, the secretary nonchalantly predicts five million for 2007.

The Dominican Republic already takes in more tourism dollars than any other country in Latin America except Mexico and Brazil, according to World Tourism Organization statistics. In the meantime, the importance of sugar, coffee, cocoa and tobacco to the economy has declined. “Tourism has been the motor of the Dominican economy for the last 20 years,” said Fernando Rainieri, the former tourism secretary and current investor in Miches. “In 1980, nobody believed in it and no one wanted to invest in it.”

The tourism industry in the Dominican Republic is focused these days on Punta Cana, which many have compared to Canc?n. For better or for worse, the comparison makes sense: like Canc?n, in the 1960’s Punta Cana was not on the map. Then, in 1969, a young Frank Rainieri flew with a group of American investors over the isolated, lightly inhabited east coast of the country; by the early 70’s the land was theirs. A 1972 law made investing in tourism a nearly tax-free endeavor, and the government backed the first beach resort, Playa Dorada, which opened on the north coast simultaneously with the Puerto Plata airport in 1980.

The next year Club Med opened in Punta Cana, followed closely by the Spanish hotel company Barcel?. The Punta Cana Airport, privately owned and operated by Mr. Rainieri and the Punta Cana Group, opened in 1985 and in 1988 the Puntacana Resort & Club opened. More followed, and through August of this year, according to official Central Bank statistics, 1.26 million foreigners not of Dominican origin (presumably tourists) entered the country through Punta Cana. That is nearly three times as many as flew into Santo Domingo, the capital and by far the country’s biggest city.

The country has also been investing in infrastructure. There is the Tourist Boulevard between Punta Cana and Uvero Alto. Late last month, the Dominican president, Leonel Fern?ndez, was in Punta Cana to meet with hotel owners, and Frank Rainieri suggested they begin thinking about stretching the highway beyond Uvero Alto to Miches. (Which, coincidentally or not, is where his brother Fernando owns land). A highway from Santo Domingo to the beautiful Saman? peninsula is supposed to be completed in 2008, and the airport at Saman?, El Catey International Airport, is to open next month. Not coincidentally, the Gran Bah?a Principe resort chain will open about a thousand luxury hotel rooms in the next two months, in four different complexes.

With the high-end hordes bearing down upon them, though, hotel operators face a problem: quality of service. Tourism officials and hotel executives all seem to read from the same talking points: the Dominican people are the country’s biggest asset, what with their warm hearts, friendly faces and big smiles. But hand-clapping, merengue-dancing Club Med smiles are one thing; boutique hotel “Let me explain our pillow menu to you” smiles quite another.

The flaws during my two days in Tortuga Bay made that all too clear.

Sometimes, they were funny: a welcome letter left for Jon and me in our bedroom (with two separate beds, I hasten to point out), read, “Mr. Kugel, thank you again for choosing us for your honeymoon vacation.” But more often they were annoying. Repeated dial-2 calls to our butler to help us reduce the air-conditioning level from Arctic freeze to Caribbean cooldown produced fruitless advice; we would have shivered through two nights if the comforters Oscar de la Renta chose for us weren’t so cozy. Jon got charged the outside guest rate for a round of golf ($50 extra) even though our butler had made the tee time and it had been confirmed with a letter from management. (And some things even the best of service couldn’t have helped. That pristine view from our balcony covered up a secret: just beyond the shoreline, the precious sand gave way to a bottom so rocky and slippery as to make taking a dip genuinely unpleasant.)

Hayd?e Palmieri, the vice president of hospitality and human resources at Punta Cana (and Frank Rainieri’s wife), acknowledged the flaws in service, though she did point out that Leading Hotels of the World had approved their application in September, making them the second member from the Dominican Republic (along with the Paradisus Palma Real).

Andr? Gerondeau, executive vice president for Sol Meli?, which owns the Paradisus, acknowledges that raising the level of service will take time. “Anywhere in the world,” he said, “especially in Latin America, there is a huge gap between people that have resources and those who don’t,” which makes high-end service a problem. The Dominican Republic is quickly catching up, he said. But still, “if someone has been to Bali, Seychelles, St. Bart’s and then comes to the D.R.,” he said, “they will certainly see a difference. You need to connect with your team members. The overall perception of us versus them is a killer.”

Will the Dominican Republic dominate the Caribbean for years to come? Puerto Rico is feeling the heat, having fallen behind it in tourism receipts, if not absolute numbers, in 2004, and is fighting back with a new Tourism and Transportation Strategic Plan. And the stress on beaches, golf, beaches and golf — the themes that dominate the Web site, godominicanrepublic.com and its Republic of Colors campaign, may leave the country open to competition with places like Jamaica, whose advertising and Web site (visitjamaica.com) also stresses people, culture, art, music, food and ecotourism.

This much is safe to say: The secretary of tourism’s prediction of five million visitors in 2007 will very likely come true. Or there will be a lot of really expensive hotel rooms, villas and bungalows lying empty.

We deal with the  following types of properties:

Cabarete villas
Caribbean condo
Caribbean oceanfront
Caribbean villas
Condo Dominican
Condos Dominican
Dominica villa
Oceanfront Caribbean
Sosua condo rental
Villa Dominican
Villas Caribbean
Villas Dominican