Its taken me a while to decide whether to post this, but I dont want other newbies to go through what we went through, and I wished I had been warned about people like this and how it works in DR. We ran around like mad things- 18 hour days doing up our house, finding workmen furniture etc, but DR is beautiful and so are some of the people, so we enjoyed.. until we met the Angel of Hell and his mouthpiece, Richard Hunt. Before we arrived we bought our house from Century 21 and we were put through to Margaret Hunt. We asked to ensure the house was clean for our arrival. We later found out that agents usually do this anyway at their cost for their clients. She told us the house only needed a lick of paint and tlc and "trust me you've got a real bargain". I know what everyone is thinking, its our own fault for buying without seeing, but that was our gamble. We arrived to find it was a bargain, its now worth about 2/3 times what we paid, so the gamble was good. Apart from the fact she omitted to tell us about the cracks from the earthquake., the place was filthy, the pool had about 8mths of dirty infested water, loads of frogs and other yuks, you couldnt live in the house it was so bad. We returned to Century 21 and Guido Perdomo acted fast and referred us to Dean Brown, they arranged for a structural engineer to examine the next day and luckily the crack was superficial. Then we were sent a man called Angel by Margaret Hunts' husband, Richard, who told us he'd cleaned the house and presented us with a bill for 9811 pesos for 2 people for 1 day, (even if they did the work the max should have been 700pesos) I took him around and showed him the filth. Im shortening this, as this man plagued us for days, when we finally referred him to Mags Hunt to sort it out. Some hours later we received the nastiest foulest call I have ever had from Richard Hunt, who was determined to get his commission from the deal with Angel. The first words were "You are going to f...... jail on Friday", in Dr this is the way people are threatened as lawyers dont work weekends... The call continued in the most evil threatening manner, pure extortion and blackmail, unless we handed over the money. We were stunned, but not surprised as this mans character and behaviour had already been made known to us. It was unfortunate for him that he didnt know who we really were or our background. The wheels moved very quickly the next day, a phonecall to a powerful person in the UK, a meeting at the British Consulate, who called Juan Perdomo and the matter was completely taken out of our hands. We were offered to have the extortionist/s arrested, but we thought we'd leave that offer on the shelf should there be any further incidents, and only take it up ON A FRIDAY. We cant thank Juan Perdomo enough and Century 21 for stepping in and dealing with this and we have continued to buy property from 2 good trustworthy sales agents, Dean Brown, Century 21 and Sandeep from Remax.. both reputable companies. (Sandeep put us up at his lovely home until ours was habitable). One of the lessons we have learnt is to do things the Dominican way, get a quote in writing, agree, then order the work. Its queer really that most of the warnings we had read before our arrival were against some dishonest Dominicans, and it was a lowest class Brit that was the worst.