suarezn said:
Actually by law when you're building a house there are a few things you are supposed to pay. One of them is a permit fee to city hall. The builder is supposed to have insurance for his workers, so when insurance companies learn that a house is being built they go by the site and try to sell insurance to the builder who normally passes the cost to the owner. When I was building mine my builder decided not to buy the insurance. He said that he did that in the past and when one of his workers got injured he had a heck of a time getting anything from the isurance company so he preferred to take care of his employees himself.
The permit fee to city hall can normally be lowered a lot if you "negotiate" with the person collecting. In my case we just ignored it and continued to build even as they continued to come by and eventually just gave the guy a "tip" and never paid anything to city hall.
If your house is already built there was obviously no sense in insuring anything, unless they were trying to insure the house itself.
My husband said there was a fee that you needed to pay when you buid a house, maybe its some type of tax, not sure exactly what it was, but he said it should be 2000-3000 pesos. Not 30,000 as they were asking.
I don't think it had anything to do with either workers insurence, or house insurence, almost all the workers were haitians i think illegals. (Not positive) The maestro was Dominican. PS. the maestro had haiitians coming and asking if they could work on the house throughout the project, and we didn't always need their assistance.
Do you remember how much your "permit fee" was? Was it 2000 pesos or more like 20,000?
One more question, do you typically put insurence on your house you build in the DR?
I wonder what could have happened, if anything, to a haitian guy who was working on the house one day, and had a seizure. It was quite scary actually, because someone came running to my husband saying the guy had died. Fortunately they put water on him and he went home and i think is fine.