The best appraisals (e.g. the most accurate) I have found are those provided by appraisers who are authorized by Banco Popular. Check with the bank and ask them for the contact information of the appraiser they use in that area. They use these appraisers for real estate loans and the like so they are generally pretty accurate.
Exactly!
Keep in mind, this is a country with no public record keeping of past and recent transactions. While a home might have been offered for years for $X.xx with no sales, the lesser one done the road may have sold over night for much more or much less. There is no real market. Neighborhoods are too fragmented, the overall situation way too difficult to catalogize, too much conflicting "information".
So, it's extremely difficult to put a "real" or "official" price tag on a property. Then, the only way to find a value range, would be to see what others would pay for it... like asking, how much they would take it as a guarantee for a loan for. That's when the bank appraiser comes in.
In Spain, we've been doing this all the time, until banks realized people were just using their appraisal service with no real intention to mortgage a property. So, they started asking for an upfront appraisal fee, which still was an attractive option to get an often refreshing idea of what something could really be worth. But mind you, when properties were flying high, they too, overestimated the market and it's future... and many banks over appraised properties in the hopes to earn a client... and later got stuck with a property they could not sell for half of what was owed to them... Not a high risk right now in the DR for that, however.
... J-D.