The Mideast metropolis of real estate wonders is at it again.
Dubai developers in recent months have been busily rolling out plans for floating houses with underwater chambers and an even bigger indoor ski slope to top the city’s existing one.
A complex of theme parks that includes the region’s first Legoland is rising in the Dubai desert. A canal that will boost the amount of sellable waterfront property is being dug under the city’s main artery, in view of the world’s tallest building. The planet’s biggest Ferris wheel is going up too.
But there are signs that Dubai’s heady boom-bust-boom property sector is once again cooling.
A ranking of house prices released by London-based property consultancy Knight Frank ahead of the annual Cityscape Global real estate extravaganza, which began Tuesday, found Dubai was the worst performer among 56 global markets.
The firm’s index showed Dubai house prices dropped by 12.2 percent over the past year through June. That left homeowners in the emirate faring worse than those in other laggards such as Ukraine, which faces an ongoing separatist insurgency in the east, and cash-strapped Greece.
Dubai’s declines were fueled by “weaker demand, a strong U.S. dollar and ongoing cooling measures” such as mortgage limits and higher transaction fees that authorities have implemented to regulate the sector, according to Knight Frank.
A separate report this week from Los Angeles-based property firm CBRE recorded a 6 percent annual sales rate decline through the end of August.
The last time Dubai property prices faltered, they fell hard, plunging by nearly half from their 2008 peak as easy financing dried up and the skyscraper-studded city found itself with far too much supply.
In late 2009, a crisis involving billions of dollars in debt owed by government-backed conglomerate Dubai World and its Nakheel property subsidiary, which built the emirate’s famed palm-shaped islands, sent shudders through global markets still edgy from the global financial crisis. Details