Nakheel and Limitless fade into history in Dubai restructuring

Nakheel, the company that once boasted that it got the vision of Dubai built, and Limitless whose name said it all, are to disappear with their demerger from the the Dubai World conglomerate and the transfer of legal ownership to a new Dubai Government entity.

Dubai Real Estate Corporation was formed last month ‘to own and manage the properties registered in the name of the Government or any of its departments’. It has not been announced whether the Nakheel and Limitless trading names will ever be used again for property development in the emirate.

Bad names

But it is probably unlikely. Nakheel became synominous with the excesses of the Dubai real estate boom with its second and third Palm islands, now abandoned and the largely empty map of The World picked out in islands offshore.

The projects that remain need to go back to the drawing board now that Dubai World is in the final stages of winding up its property empire and has rescheduled its debt and outstanding payments to contractors.

It is hard to believe but this autumn it will be three years since the Dubai real estate crash, a bubble that was burst by the global financial crisis. Dubai is finally burying its dead.

No doubt a few of the Nakheel projects will resurface quickly, such as the Jumeirah Park villas near to the popular Emirates Living community. Others like the two other palm islands may remain dormant for years awaiting another property boom in the future. Even the original Palm Jumeirah still has a lot of vacant land and will take years to fully complete.

Building completions

However, Dubai is looking much more finished than it did three years ago. Oversupply or not many developers have quietly got on with finishing off their buildings, and the RTA is finally completing many of the road projects started in the boom.

It leaves the city with a superb collection of modern architecture and some outstanding buildings, particularly the tallest in the world, the Burj Khalifa and the towers of Dubai Marina, the Dubai International Financial Centre and Business Bay, plus the ultra modern metro, the first in a Gulf State.

So the vision lives on even as memories of the real estate crash fade into history. Tomorrow is always another day in the city with the best urban infrastructure in the Middle East.