Dubai property developers are seeking to attract overseas buyers amid slowing sales at home.
Sobha Developers said yesterday that it plans to open five sales offices in overseas locations to market its Dubai homes.
Sobha, which is currently promoting a US$4 billion project of 282 off-plan villas and 1,800 apartments at its Sobha Hartland project close to Business Bay, said it was in the process of opening new sales offices in London, Singapore, Riyadh, Doha and Kuwait City by July 2015.
It has sold abouthalf of the 73 villas and 79 apartments included in the first phase of the development since the project launched last summer.
The developer is the latest to look overseas to boost sales and tap into a wider pool of buyers.
The Dubai developers Emaar and Damac have also staged overseas launches in markets as diverse as London, Riyadh, Jeddah, Delhi and Mumbai.
“We are currently seeing more and more Dubai-based projects marketed overseas as the number of purchasers is getting even smaller and the number of potential lenders is tightening,” said Simon Townsend, international capital markets and business development manager for the Middle East at DTZ.
The number of property transactions in the emirate fell by nearly 15 per cent last year, according to Dubai Land Department data. Prices also started to soften during the second half of 2014.
Last week the property agent JLL predicted that house prices in the emirate would fall by about 10 per cent this year while the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s predicted the decline could be high as 20 per cent.
“There is no question that there is a slowdown,” said Ajay Rajendran, vice chairman of Sobha.
“But is it a slowdown sufficient to affect prudent and seasoned developers? I don’t think so. We could be in serious trouble if the sort of price rises we saw a year ago continued for the next two years.”
Sobha said that it was selling apartments at about Dh1,600 per square foot and the villas were priced at about Dh2,050 per sq ft. The company said that 80 per cent of buyers were end users.
The developer is nearing the completion of the first of two schools at the project, which is due to open for the September 2015 school year.
The project is Sobha’s second scheme in the Dh21 billion Mohammed bin Rashid City.
lbarnard@thenational.ae
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