Inventory of completed property running low in Dubai

The pages of the four Gulf News property advertising supplements tell an interesting story: estate agents are running out of completed homes for sale.

Even the most cursory flip over these pages shows that where agents once displayed a couple of dozen properties on a page, there are now a handful. If you pay more attention you will note the same property making several different appearances in the adverts of other agents.

Another giveaway is where you see similar properties listed with a big difference in price. The first will usually be one that sold a while ago and is still being advertised, while the second will be priced for sale at the current, higher price.

You will also notice adverts saying; ‘Wanted Meadows villas, any type’ and so forth. Indeed, owners in the most popular locations get frequent calls from estate agents desperate to find houses to sell. For a boom without property to sell is no value to estate agents!

Too many agents?

Or are there just too many agents in town all chasing the dwindling number of properties on offer? That too may be true. In addition, there are owners who put their property on the market, find out the level of demand and decide they would rather keep it and wait for the price to go higher.

So it promises to be an even hotter summer for Dubai real estate this year with the shortage of completed property compounded by worries about the delivery times on off-plan schemes. People who might have bought off-plan are thinking again, and wondering whether to enter the secondary market, putting further pressure on prices.

Could this be the final upward spike of the Dubai property boom? It seems unlikely to stop anytime soon with oil at $115 a barrel. But sub-international price levels can not last much longer in Dubai.