This has got me wondering - since we timed our entry to Dubai a couple of months before the Crash - what was it like in the few years before that? I mean, did everyone/ anyone really believe that all these projects were going to fly? That anything was possible? That you didn't actually have to worry about the end-user?

Just really curious.

Many people really did believe the hype.

I spoke to many who really believed the boom would continue indefinitely and that were convinced that "bricks and mortar are always safe", despite evidence to the contrary. Sadly, when people really want to believe something, they won't listen.

Almost every week I have people coming to me for advice as they have lots loads of money in UAE properties. Some are in serious negative equity for half a dozen.

I definitely think there are more people in this situation that we will ever find out about as well. I know families who just left, left the houses standing.

Ajman International Airport

It was crazy, lady! Craaaaazy!

I only came in January '08 but did have a solid eight months of boom and two additional months of a weird peak where everything was so expensive and lots of stuff were still being planned but the cracks were also increasingly visible.

I was more jaded about the Dubai possibilities because as a newcomer it was so obvious that there was a huge oversupply about to hit the market at any minute. Driving past Business Bay and JLT and realising half the towers were completely empty.....it was bizarre how other people couldn't see the dangers in all the empty office spaces and flats. They kept coming up with excuses for why Dubai was different, how lots of people bought real estate only to hold it, not rent it out so end users wasn't a problem (but did they see the underlying flaw in that logic? No).

But it did seem like every weekend was one long party. People did work hard - and partied hard. I was astonished at how many of my coworkers would easily blow through 1-2000 AED in a single weekend.

you can add to those projects that were never opened
believe the World Hockey Academy in Sports City was finished in 2009 but still hasn't been opened

I seem to remember having long discussions on this very forum with people like Border Reiver and expat brat (are they still around?), both of whom insisted that the boom could never end because Dubai was so different and that I was just exhibiting sour grapes for missing the boat

In fact ISTR I got the idea for my screen name after someone accused me of being too negative and that I was acting just like Eeyore by predicting economic strife for Dubai when everything was just fine...

Over on "another forum", there was someone called Roadrunner who had swallowed the government propaganda hook, line and sinker. She refused to believe that the market was an unsustainable and artificial one being driven almost entirely by speculators, and even as the credit crunch was starting to take hold, she was confidently posting that Dubai would be completely immune because the UAE was "awash with cash" and there was "so much liquidity".

At about the same time, the chairman of Emaar was quoted in the Gulf News as saying he fully expected that the crunch would push the value of Dubai property to ever-more stratospheric heights, because it was going to be such a safe haven for real estate investors. I wish I'd saved a copy of that story; after the Dubai property market collapsed I tried to find it again on the Gulf News website but it had curiously disappeared.

Something else that made me laugh was the way so many of the cheerleaders shamelessly changed their tune from "Dubai is different, it will be immune to the credit crunch" to "it's a global meltdown, of course Dubai will be affected"...

A few weeks ago I was talking to a guy who said that a PA from his company had been forced to abscond over unwise property investment. She'd bought somewhere off-plan in the last year of the boom and had made a tidy profit by flipping it. Like so many others she decided that here was the magic money tree that could never fail, so she persuaded all her family to pool their savings and send them to her so that she could invest it all in more off-plan properties.

All told she invested something like $300,000. She now owes - drumroll - $4,000,000. That's dollars, not dirhams. Her salary as a PA was about 12K AED per month. Presumably she will be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

Remember how, back in 2002, a certain extremely senior personage in the Dubai government reassured the world that nobody who invested in real estate in Dubai would lose money?

"Remember how, back in 2002, a certain extremely senior personage in the Dubai government reassured the world that nobody who invested in real estate in Dubai would lose money?"...as it was before my time here, I would be interested to know whom you are talking about, Eeyore.

Take a look at this article about The Light House, which was pretty much the first development to go tits-up (at least publicly), in 2005. The third paragraph in particular

I believe that SM's words were subsequently reinterpreted to mean that the money of western investors dealing directly with official government-backed developers would be safe.

Nobody seems to know if the investors were able to claw any money back. I suspect any restitution was and is conditional on keeping their traps shut.

That's just reminded me, wasn't there supposed to be a large residential component to Meydan? That whole area taken up by the old camel racing track?

eeyore since both of us took a lot of flak back in the day as it were im sure you too have had fun saying "i told you so" or would if any of those that deserve it hadnt done runners.

i know of 1 ex property lawyer for a magic circle firm who did a runner owing on something like 20 odd properties.


re meydan yes there was supposed to be a whole city built there including a whole section dedicated to vets horse breeding etc. remember seeing the model and having a giggle

.......... and which, if I recall correctly, was the bit that was due to be built on what was the Country Club and the Exiles rugby ground............

the area where the Country Club was penned for residential, apartment blocks etc. Nice to see you back on here

How is Dubai Sports City going?

A friend who lives in Dubai bought a villa off-plan there in early 2006 to be his family home, scheduled to be available in 2007/8, and tried to persuade me to go 50:50 on another one as an investment (an opportunity I declined and he didn't go through with it on his own).

In late 2008, it was not finished but he claimed the unbuilt villa was now worth twice what he had paid for it and his biggest worry was that the developers would cancel the contract and give him his money back, so they could sell it to someone else for more.

He has been very cagey about the topic for the last couple of years. I know for a fact that he is not living in this villa and to the best of my knowledge it is not finished. However, I can't get a straight answer out of him... (he's a salesman - good at success stories, but not so good at communicating failure...)

So, does anyone know how it's going there?

The Anar tower..? Not heard of this before.

here



Gotta love these novel ideas with wind turbines on buildings...Have they ever been able to deliver on what they promised? I mean..the amount of electricity generated by the WTC in Bahrain is a joke.