CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Property Investing in Dubai

Dubai is one of the seven United Arab Emirates, which sit on the Arabian Peninsula facing the Arabian Gulf. Fuelled by business, soaring tourism and hedonism, Dubai is the best known of the emirates and the newest playground for the rich and famous. These days the country doesn’t require much introduction, not after the spate of television programmes, breathless articles and all the signs that journalists have been running out of superlatives.

Where once lay a sleepy pearl fishing village, a city vision is rising from the desert sands. Dubai is a project on a grand scale. Rather than a city as we know it, it is a piece of master planned architecture where record breaking projects such as the Palm increasingly seem to be no more than ornamental details on Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed Al Maktoum’s creation. His vision is for a modern metropolis unrivalled in its luxury, that is both the Florida and Singapore of the Middle East; only bigger and better.

Dubai itself is a project that is still far from completion. The scale of ongoing and planned development is inconcievable. Most countries in the world struggle with one mega-project, but in Dubai there are currently more than 26 such projects in various stages of completion. From Dubai Land which offers 2 billion square feet of leisure development to the Dubai International Finance City, Hydropolis, the world’s first underwater hotel and the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building.

The vision for Dubai is to transform it from…