Personally, after living here for 10 years, I still don't feel attracted to buying property. Mainly two reasons. You can live in a quiet neighborhood for years and know anybody, then all of sudden, someone decides to leave or decides to sell their property to someone else who then attracts other people that might not be that quiet anymore.
That has happened several times already. We rented a big apartment on the 2nd floor for only 8k pesos (10 years ago), the neighborhood was a bit noisy, but it was fine at that time. Nobody rented downstairs, so no issue. Then the landlady decided to rent it to a guy who was going to have a private school with like 40 kids in it, so very noisy in the mornings with all those kids that also clogged up the sewage pipes, a total disaster. Took about 1 year for her to get rid of that guy. Then she rented to another group of people, a couple of them were prostitutes with their clients and all the screaming and well it was not nice. So finally we decided to move to another place.
Then it happened again, we moved to a very quiet place, with just normal noise, like people partying during holidays and so on. Then someone decided to sell a neighboring building, and the new owners then built a bar on the first floor, with ALOT of notice EVERY F NIGHT! So after a couple of months, we kind of got tired of that and then moved to another part of the same area. And we've been living here now for 3 years, and we've had it very tranquil, not a lot of noise although a couple of neighbors who've had to leave the area because of their conduct. But like 6 months ago the owner of the lot on the backside of our apartment decided to build a bar there, and although they haven't had the success they wanted, on the weekends there's still a lot of noise.
So although you might like the area you decide to live in, in a short while that could change completely. So then if you are renting, you can just decide to move to another place, a bit harder if you buy a place. This obviously doesn't apply to many ex-pat residential areas where they have common "rules" that you kind of have to live by if you want to stay there.
Then the second thing is money! I've rented all the time I've lived here and in total, I think I might have spent around $25k in rent over these past 10 years.
And I can guarantee you, you CANNOT find any kind of property for $25k ANYWHERE on this island. And yeah you would say that it's an investment, well, what does it matter if you have a $250k house but you cannot sell it.
And obviously, I've been living in areas with Dominicans all around me, not any residential areas with most ex-pats. So there you have another difference.