We didn’t IPO. We did something cooler first.
After 15 months of grueling work, thousands of pages of documentation, countless calls and on-site visits, and audits across three countries, we finally did it. The Samaná Landbank Trust, part of Samaná Group, is now the first Dominican, and Caribbean, real estate trust with a securitization that carries a Swiss ISIN and custody at SIX SIS, the central securities depository of the Swiss exchange group. If that sentence sounds like alphabet soup, this post is for you.
What we actually built, in plain English
There are three layers:
- The Dominican fund. The Samaná Landbank Trust is a real estate trust (a fideicomiso inmobiliario, the Dominican equivalent of a REIT) holding the land. It is managed locally by FiduCapital S.A., a licensed trustee in the Dominican Republic.
- The securitization. Estating Property Vault S.A., a securitization platform of the Estating Group in Luxembourg, converts the trust’s underlying investments into debt securities.
- The Swiss plumbing. Those securities carry a Swiss ISIN, which is the international identifier banks use to find and trade a security. They are held in custody at SIX SIS, with a payment agent, Allen & Overy Shearman advising on the legal documentation, and PwC as auditor of the issuing platform.
The result: accredited investors anywhere in the world can subscribe through their normal brokerage account and hold the securities in their custody account, like any other bond. The first issue raised PLN 20 million, according to Polish business media coverage in November 2025.
Why is this big?
Real estate financing is usually local. European and American investors trust what is close to them and avoid what they cannot understand. In the Dominican Republic, access to capital is tough. Large local private investors want control. Banks charge 10 to 15% interest, if they consider a young company with foreign founders at all. And bad players ruined trust in crowdfunding for everyone.
The core problem is information. A foreign investor looking at a Caribbean project faces an obvious question: how do I know it is real? Traditionally the answer is a brochure, a site visit and trust in the salesperson. That is a weak basis for sending serious money abroad, and the industry’s history of failures shows why investors are cautious.
Trust, outsourced to institutions
Here is the idea I care about most, and it is an opinion rather than a statistic: in a market where distrust is the main cost of capital, independent verification is worth more than marketing. When securities sit in a regulated custodian, an auditor signs the accounts, a law firm checks the documents and a licensed trustee holds the land, investors no longer have to take the promoter’s word for anything. Each party has its own reputation and liability at stake, and any one of them can refuse to sign.
I always believed we could build a Caribbean real-estate project that earns the trust of the most regulated financial markets, one that could pass every audit, checklist and compliance test in Zurich, London or New York. So we set out to do what seemed nearly impossible: take a Caribbean project and make it meet the standards of the Swiss financial system, where only the safest and most transparent structures are approved. It took 15 months because each of those parties had to be convinced independently.
What this is not
To be careful with language: this is not a stock-market IPO, and I’d rather say so than let the headline imply it. It is a debt securitization sold to accredited investors. Having a Swiss ISIN and Swiss custody is a statement about the infrastructure the securities run on, not a guarantee of returns, and investors should read the terms like they would for any bond. What the structure does is give them visibility and recourse that an informal deal never could.
What comes next
The work is far from done. This is the first of three trusts we are building to make our vision of a private town a reality, alongside the upcoming Development Trust and the Rental and Utilities Management Trust. This first one was the hardest. We had to earn recognition, build credibility and prove that a project born in the Caribbean could meet the highest global financial and sustainability standards. From here it gets easier, because the foundation of trust and transparency is now in place.
This milestone is not just about financing. It is the first real step toward a self-sustaining private town that lives in harmony with nature, innovation and long-term value.
Huge thanks to everyone who believed in this vision and helped us execute it: the whole Samana Group team, our partners, especially Estating and Fiducapital S.A., our investors Pointer.Capital and Piotr Baran, and Allen & Overy, PwC, SIX and Adelaida Adames. Want to learn more? Visit samana.group.
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