Faisal Durrani

People need housing.

Therefore, there is demand for housing.

The population is rising.

It grew by about 5.9% last year.

So again, those people need homes to live in.

But one of the things we are keeping a close eye on is the rising volume of residential supply.

now for the next five years we're tracking about 350 000 homes that could potentially be delivered by the end of the decade which works out to about 70 000 homes a year but whilst that is about double the level of housing completions the city has seen over the last 20 years what we are noting is that developers aren't necessarily able to deliver everything they're promising on time

In fact, last year, the completion or materialization rate was about 46%.

And the year before that, it was 50%.

So we seem to have a contracting capacity issue in the market, which to an extent is perhaps shielding the market from the risk of an oversupply.

But of course, if developers do manage to deliver 50, 60, 70, 80 percent of whatever they are promising on time, then we do need to be quite careful about that balance between demand and supply, because right now things do appear to be quite finely balanced.

Yeah, look, very good question.

And I think as cliche as it sounds, no two property cycles are ever the same.

Dubai is a relatively young market by global standards.

It only opened to international buyers back in 2002.

And we've had two full property cycles.

We're in our third freehold residential market cycle at the moment.

There are several fundamental differences between this cycle and previous ones, but one of the most important ones relative to the question you just asked me is the nature of buyers on the market.

Now, what we know is that the previous property market cycles were defined by what we call speculative investment activity.

So people essentially buying to flip.