Why we launched Samana Legal
Samana Legal is now live at samanalegal.com. The website explains what we do. This post is about why we did it.
Building Samana Group on the Samaná Peninsula, we have been the developer, the buyer, the seller and the landowner. In Dominican property those are four different jobs, and each one goes wrong in its own way. We made the mistakes, paid for them and fixed them. Our legal team, led by attorney Ronald Báez, did most of the fixing.
What I learned is that very little goes wrong because someone was cheated. It goes wrong because something was never done: a survey nobody ordered, an heir who never signed, a transfer that was never registered, a tax exemption nobody checked. Those gaps stay invisible until you try to sell, borrow or build, and by then they are expensive.
What we actually did, with our own money
- We bought land that had no title and took it through to a registered certificate of title. That is the foundation of a land bank now approaching four million square metres, assembled parcel by parcel.
- We negotiated with the families living on our parcels, documented every settlement, and then fenced and watched the land so nobody new arrived.
- We unlocked land that a family had been arguing over for two generations, by tracing heirs and collecting signatures they had failed to obtain for decades.
- We caught sellers hiding liens, boundaries that did not match the survey and cases already in court, before the money moved.
- We obtained permits, worked with the authorities and built roughly four kilometres of roads with drainage, water, electricity, lighting and fibre.
- Our environmental pre-feasibility study found a wetland that cannot carry construction. We used that finding in the negotiation and moved the commercial area onto better ground.
- We ran a CONFOTUR application from an empty folder to filing, and built a land trust whose parcels were valued by certified Dominican appraisers and whose bonds were admitted to the SIX Swiss Exchange.
- We signed a construction contract where the builder is paid on delivery, with insurance behind it.
Occupants, heirs, unregistered land and unreliable sellers are not rare cases in Samaná. They are the normal conditions of the market. People who have only read about them price them wrongly. We have lived them.
What Samana Legal does
If you are buying. We check the title, litigation, liens, seller identity and tax standing, and send a surveyor to confirm the land on the ground is the land on the paper. We read off-plan contracts and permits, advise on whether to hold in your own name, a Dominican company or a trust, handle closing through to the new title, verify CONFOTUR (which does not pass to a buyer on a second-hand purchase), prepare investor residency files from US$200,000, and fix inherited problems.
If you are building. We take untitled land to registered title, resolve successions and boundary disputes, run permits as a schedule with a named person responsible for each, file and maintain CONFOTUR, structure companies and trusts, prepare projects for foreign capital, and produce the full set of buyer paperwork your sales team needs.
How we work
Samana Legal advises, coordinates and manages. Every act reserved to licensed Dominican attorneys is performed by licensed Dominican attorneys, and you are told at the start who is signing what. Ronald leads the practice, supported by partner law firms, surveyors, certified appraisers and technical specialists.
We charge a fixed price per piece of work, quoted in writing before we start. The process has four steps: you send us what you have, we quote, we do the work with one person as your contact, and you receive a complete file with every certificate, permit and registration in one place, so the next transaction starts from a clean folder.
Why now
2026 brought changes to how real estate is taxed in the Dominican Republic, and an amnesty window for owners with title irregularities or unfiled returns that runs until 31 December. If something in your file is unresolved, the cheapest time to fix it is before that date.
Send us your case
A title, a contract, a project you are considering, or a problem you already have. Write to Ronald Báez at ronald.baez@samana.group or use the form at samanalegal.com. We answer the same business day and tell you what is missing. The site is available in English, Spanish and Polish.
Marek Zmysłowski
Founder and CEO, Samana Group
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