Dubai moving towards the ‘Most Transparent’ Real Estate Marktet in the MENA Region
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Dubai, the most populated emirate of UAE is potentially on it’s way to be included in the JLL’s ..
The emirate has been well on it’s way for a while, strengthening it’s foothold as the region’s top pick for foreign investors, including the people that are in need of new residential or commercial properties. Recently, the Real Estate Market of Dubai has moved up and was ranked the most transparent in the region by the JLL’s biennial Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) 2022, being ranked 31st out of 94 cities in and around the world.
This is the first time the emirate has landed on the ‘transparent’ tier of the index, becoming the only Real Estate market in the MENA region to be featured in the said category.
Given the number of its initiatives, the emirate has the potential to further improve its ranking and join the group of the so-called “highly transparent" markets, according to Jeremy Kelly, Global Research Director at JLL.
The markets that are currently considered “highly transparent” by the JLL index have the UK, France, Australia among 8 others. These markets are considered open, active yet private owing to their demonstration of accountability and quality of governance. These real estate markets account for 80% of the global investments in the commercial real estate sector.
“What we’ve seen in Dubai is that it’s moved from ‘low transparency’ [on the index] a decade ago to ‘semi-transparent’ category and it’s now sitting in the ‘transparent’ category for the first time this year,” Kelly says at a briefing hosted by JLL in Dubai.
Improving Transparency Numbers
Kelly said Dubai can continue to work on providing market data for real estate investors, as well as “regulations and metrics relating to decarbonization and sustainability”, to move higher in the transparency ranking.
Sustainability is becoming a big deal and is one of the prime markers for transparency as shareholders and investors are constantly on a lookout for risk indicators and environmental impacts of their real estate assets
With sustainability in mind, Dubai can consider “extending its regulations beyond new buildings” and looking at retrofitting existing property stock to “get buildings firmly on the decarbonization agenda”, Kelly said without further elaborating.
He says:
that Dubai also has a “huge opportunity” to flaunt the sustainability credentials at the upcoming Cop28 event. The UAE has the honor of hosting the 28th session of the Conference of Parties (Cop28) next year to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the purpose of which is to work on sustainability and to promote cooperation to deal with global issues collectively.
World’s most transparent real estate markets
Developers have been using the JLL’s transparency guide as a reference for a while now along with investors and occupiers who need to assess the transparency numbers of a real estate market.
Transparency has become critically linked to higher investments and ensuring that governments, investors and occupiers make decisions that are smart and profitable in the long run.
Dubai is not alone in becoming one of the most transparent markets of the MENA Region. The emirate of Abu Dhabi is also being recognized as one of the top globally improving real estate markets in the JLL’s transparency index this year.
The improvements in question have been by virtue of major governmental initiatives over the years that have led to an increase in market transparency percentages. Among the initiatives, some are regulations around market lending practices, beneficial ownership tracking and sustainability reporting.
Dubai has also significantly digitized their processes and enhanced their services and data provision processes digitally like service charge management, automated valuation and transactions databases through the Dubai Real Estate Self Transaction (Dubai REST) Platform.
The Dubai Land Department (DLD) has also taken great measures like publishing the volume and value of real estate transactions on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.