A question of value

When the property market was booming, many companies started speculatively investing in projects to boost their profits. To book these profits, some changed their accounting policies so that they could reassess the value of their land and property every quarter and take any increases as a "fair value gain" in their financial statements. This meant profits rising by, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dirhams in a quarter, even though the company had not sold the property.

Now that the property economy is in a recession, these decisions (both to invest and to value property on a quarterly basis) are coming back to haunt these companies. An interesting exercise is to look at

Oman Insurance Co

, the largest insurance provider in the UAE.

The company saw its investments in property increase from Dh493,940,000 at the end of 2007 to Dh880,883,000 by the end of 2008, an increase of 78.3 per cent. See my table of its property accounting

.

But by the end of 2009 - a year when prices dropped precipitously - they had rearranged their financial statements and taken losses. In an interesting move, they shifted Dh316,124,000 worth of their property at the value of October 2008 into "property and equipment" because it planned to build an "owner occupied" building itself but neglected to report this until a year later.

It took a fair value loss of Dh174,464,000 on investment properties and Dh39,000,000 on advances on investment property. Still, this gave them overall property holdings of Dh725,625,000 by the end of the first three months of 2010.

Professional valuers

that could affect earnings for quarters ahead.