The year of unprecedented events and challenging tasks! Is this how the 2020 could be described? Well, within a short time, a collective mindset around the world changed from the cheerful optimistic to the one that is much more somber. The supposed spread of a minor flu led an entire planet to shut down, and it’s highly doubtful that anyone will forget the empty city streets and barren skies presented by the Stark images, anytime sooner.
And for Dubai, a city that survived on a near constant state of motion, this long stillness would have caused a massive death blow. Hospitality, tourism and retail were the biggest industries obstructed by this state of events, of course, but even the real-estate industry felt the sting quite hard as well. After a gloomy 2019, the sector was just seeing the sunrise and then the pandemic rose not giving an opportunity to flourish. A citywide lockdown masked the future in a dark cloud of uncertainty. Dubai, nevertheless, is strong. It battered the financial disturbance of 2008, and the COVID-19 pandemic could not hold the city back, either. Cheers to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government’s swift and conclusive arrangements in handling the pandemic, the lockdown persisted barely a month, and Dubai was open for business once more before the end of the summer.
It had been already forecasted that the budget, and subsequently the real-estate market, would steadily recover from the dreadful depths it had hit earlier in the year. But in a notable turn, retrieval proved to take on more of a V than a U shape, with real-estate businesses coming back up to 2019 levels within the span of two months. This ramp-up in action sustained through the second half of the year. In November, a nearly seven-year record was devastated as the month saw the finishing point of 3,928 transactions worth AED 7.65 billion (GBP 1.52 billion). December shadowed suit with 3,751 transactions worth AED 7.5 billion (GBP 1.49 billion), with a 9.7-percent upsurge in secondary-market transactions from the previous month. In total, there were 35,434 transactions worth AED 72.49 billion (GBP 14.45 billion) over the course of the year, the vast popularity of which emerged during the fourth quarter. People altered their performances and customs as a result of the pandemic, which was revealed in the home-buying and renting developments that we have seen over the past nine months. Whereas once someone may have bought a home purely for its artistic appeal or proximity to lifestyle magnetisms, buyers are now taking a scientific approach to their searches. The excellence of life that a house can offer is key, and the old saying that “your house is your castle” has never been truer than it is today.
Furthermore, several government initiatives were announced last year, like, legislative changes to how personal assets will be spread after divorce, revisions to inheritance laws, the ability for locally operated companies to have 100-percent foreign ownership, the Abraham Accords (which have already brought in strong interest from Israeli investors) and most recently, citizenship for residents who fulfill certain criteria, to improve the investor confidence.
