Dubai Real Estate Sees Decline in Buyer Enquiries and Transactions

It's been a slow market for Dubai in the last quarter of last year - fewer buyer enquiries and transactions - and the latest Emirates NBD Dubai Real Estate tracker says this is due to weak investor sentiment and muted market conditions, AME Info reports.

According to the release, this drop in buyer enquiries is the sharpest that the survey has seen since April. This new year does not look promising either with 47 percent of real estate agents forecasting Dubai's property values to fall and only 32 percent forecasting it to rise.

Half of the real estate agents who participated in the survey reported a drop in average sold prices; however, developers can breathe a little with the latest reading showing the slowest pace of declines since June. Meanwhile, a drop in transaction volumes and movement was also observed.

Real estate consultancy CBRE is also forecasting a 10 percent decline in Dubai's residential segment this 2016, but also points out that the trend could be fragmented.

In the previous year, CBRE saw zero percent increase in the prices of rental commercial and residential properties. Emirates NBD survey shows that lettings trend will continue to weaken with the slowest rise in prices of newly agreed rental prices in the short history of the survey.

"The survey is consistent with recent data on residential sales and lettings prices in Dubai, which show prices continuing to ease. However, the momentum of [the] price decline has moderated in December. The strong USD and low oil prices are likely to remain headwinds for the real estate sector in 2016," according to Khatija Haque of MENA Research at Emirates NBD.

But Dubai households refuse to take off their optimistic hats, with two-thirds believing that their property's value would inflate in the next 12 months.

Based on Emirates NBD's economy tracker, it has been the softest expansion for Dubai's private sector in the past 5.5 years. The headline number in December was 51.8, a lower rate compared to November's 53.4, and the weakest improvement of rates since July 2010.