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By Jon Hurdle - The New York Times
March 17, 2020
SOSUA, Dominican Republic — Keith Dobson wanted to buy a retirement home in a sunny place where he could live inexpensively and watch his investment grow while persuading his children and grandchildren to visit once in a while.
With retirement approaching, Mr. Dobson, a store manager with Home Depot near Toronto, looked first in Florida, Jamaica and Barbados but wasn’t comfortable with property prices in those locations. So he was pleasantly surprised when he began looking at the relatively undeveloped north coast of the Dominican Republic.
There, he could buy a new two-bedroom house with a pool in a gated community for $120,000 — a fraction of the cost for an equivalent property in North America — in a country where he could draw his Canadian pension, take out inexpensive private health insurance, and walk to the beach in five minutes.
“We ran into someone who’s a real estate agent near our place in Canada who had invested in properties in the Dominican,” said Mr. Dobson, 62, who plans to retire in April. “He said to us that Dominican is a growing place and there are lots of people moving in, lots of construction going on, and a great opportunity to get in at preconstruction prices.”
So Mr. Dobson and his partner, Mary Cserep, 58, decided to pay $40,000 for a lot at Sosua Ocean Village, a rapidly growing coastal development here, and another $80,000 in four installments for the house, which has two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms over about 990 square feet, or 92 square meters.
Even better, Mr. Dobson said in an interview at his new property last year that he expected to be able to flip the house for about $80,000 more than the preconstruction price he paid. With the profit and his savings, he then plans to build a 1,500-square-foot house for about $95,000 on an adjoining lot that he has already purchased for $40,000.
When their retirement begins, the couple, who are keeping their home in Ontario, hope to spend about four months a year in the Dominican Republic, where they look forward to becoming part of a growing expatriate community.
“We feel we got very good value for money in a good location,” Mr. Dobson said.
In the nearby town of Sosua, real estate agents recognize that buyers like Mr. Dobson and Ms. Cserep are attracted by the Dominican Republic’s low property prices, low premiums for private health insurance (as little as $32 a month), and good air links with North American cities like Miami, which is less than a two-hour flight from the north coast city of Puerto Plata.
Saskia Conti, who runs Conti & Co., a real estate agency in the area, with her husband, Jonmar, estimated that their revenue has risen about 30 percent in the last year, largely because of increased sales to North Americans, about 70 percent of whom are retirees.
In another sign of a hotter market, many buyers have raised their target price to the $100,000 to $250,000 range, from the $50,000 to $100,000 that was previously typical, she said.
But she predicted that future price gains will be modest because of an increasing supply of newly built properties and a surplus of older homes that are harder to sell because most buyers want new construction to their own specifications, and can get it for about the same cost as an existing home.
Ms. Conti attributed her stronger sales to an improvement in the North American economy, prices that are significantly lower than in the United States, Canada or Europe, and the absence of property taxes on the first $150,000 of a purchase price.