Dubai — Mubasher: Dubai’s property market saw the delivery of 21,700 residential units in 2018, marking the highest completions since 2011, a UAE-based real estate agency said in a report.
Around 83% of the emirate’s 2018 deliveries were apartments while villas made up 17% of the deliveries, CORE said.
Dubailand continued to see the highest number of deliveries, followed by Jumeirah Village Circle and Triangle with 13%, the report found.
CORE, the UAE’s premier property services firm, said that off-plan transaction volumes in the GCC emirate fell by around 30% from 2017 to 2018, while secondary market sales jumped 9%, reflecting an end-user market.
In the same vein, Dubai’s rent and sales prices extended declines across districts of the emirate, the report said.
The report also expected as much as 28,500 units to be delivered by the end of this year, with the majority forecast in the affordable to mid-market segment.
“We expect rents to remain under pressure in 2019 and the rental market to continue being tenant friendly. We expect secondary transaction volumes to remain resilient, while sales prices are forecast to drop further due to rising levels of existing inventories and upcoming supply,” the agency said.
Edward Macura, partner at CORE, said that 2019 and 2020 are critical years in the growth trajectory of the emirate’s property market.
“Although the pace of price softening has relatively slowed, we expect a lag in sales and rental price recovery as existing vacant stock and future supply over the next couple of years is expected to outpace steady demand,” he added.
The GCC emirate’s long-running real estate decline is expected to hit bottom in at least two years on the back of adding a record number of new residences on Dubai’s property market.
Dubai’s property market will see the addition of around 31,500 homes this year, more than twice the emirate’s average annual demand over the previous five years, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing Craig Plumb, head of Middle East research at broker Jones Lang Lasalle.
