More than 18 months after it was evacuated because of a courtyard collapse, Abu Dhabi’s Aldar Properties has finally leased out all of its Al Rayyana residential gated community.
The development of 1,537 apartments across 33 low-rise residential buildings in Khalifa City A was originally completed by the developer Sorouh in 2012 and partially leased to tenants on bulk deals, including Defense Conseil International Group and Abu Dhabi Education Council.
However, on September 30, 2012 the entire complex was evacuated after a ground level courtyard at the development collapsed into an underground car park, damaging eight cars and leaving about 200 tenants needing to be re-housed.
At the time Sorouh said it had worked closely with its tenants to find alternative accommodation for them and that it had cooperated fully with an Abu Dhabi Municipality-led investigation into the collapse.
Aldar, which merged with Sorouh last year, started marketing the Al Rayyana apartments for the second time at the start of the year.
Yesterday the developer announced that the scheme, located next to Abu Dhabi Golf Club, is now fully let, six months after it was put back on the market.
Aldar said that it had signed leases with “ long-term, medium-term and annual leases” with “individual and corporate tenants from a range of sectors”.
“Achieving 100 per cent occupancy on a development as large as Al Rayyana places us significantly ahead of our expectations and is unprecedented in the Abu Dhabi market,” said the Aldar deputy chief executive Mohamed Al Mubarak.
“This great success reflects the quality of the development and the demand for a sophisticated medium and long-term leasing model by corporate tenants. We now have good visibility of our earnings at one of our key recurring revenue developments and the bulk leases have diversified risk, minimise churn and allowed us to achieve premium rental on units,” he added.
Agents reported that annual rents at the development stood at about Dh85,000 for a one-bedroom apartment. However, they added that Aldar had sweetened the deal by offering 13 months for the price of 12 for some apartments and they had offered the flats without agency fees.
“Apart from the problem of the courtyard collapsing a couple of years ago, Al Rayyana is a very nice development in the perfect place,” said Ben Crompton, the managing partner at Crompton Partners estate agents in Abu Dhabi.
“There is a real lack of good quality stock in off-island locations at the moment and the collapse happened a couple of years [ago] now, so for people looking for reasonably priced apartments in a good location it won’t really be an issue.”
lbarnard@thenational.ae
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