Carving A Property Niche

As Dubai property developer Omniyat prepares for a number of major handovers over the next two years, executive chairman and CEO Mahdi Amjad explains why staying focussed is the name of the game

- Robert Anderson

FOR MANY DUBAI landlords, the last 12 months will surely go down as a period to forget amid a wider downturn in the property market.

Apartment prices and rents decreased 3 per cent and 2 per cent respectively from Q3 to Q4 2017, according to Chestertons MENA with double-digit decreases seen in some areas of the city.

But this doom and gloom does not appear to have shaken Omniyat executive chairman and CEO Madhi Amjad as the company he founded in 2005, with Dhs300m ($81.67m) of capital under Dubai-based conglomerate Al Masa Holdings, crosses a number of major milestones

Most notably there was the recent completion of the office segment of the The Opus, a Dhs2.5bn ($680.6m) mixed-use development designed by late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Last year, the firm also handed over The Pad, a 253-apartment tower just down the road in Business Bay, and made major progress on other luxury residential and hospitality projects elsewhere in the city.

And after what Amjad himself describes as only “quite a successful year” for the firm there is a sense that he expects bigger and better things to follow as the developer pushes ahead with a series of luxury projects due for handover by 2020.

One reason for the Omniyat chairman’s optimism is a surge in demand for off-plan property, which accounted for more than 65 per cent of total sales transactions in Dubai last year, according to CBRE. And his company was certainly a beneficiary of the trend after selling what it claimed to be the most expensive apartment bought in Dubai last year – a Dhs102m ($27.7m) penthouse at its One Palm project spanning 29,800 square feet.