Payment schedules can range from increments of 10% up to 20%. It is at the discretion of the developer how they structure it
The benefit of buying off-plan is that re-sales command relatively high premiums therefore reducing any profit margin in the investment considerably.
Who Can Buy?
Acumen finally seems to have entered the minds of UAE’s Federal Government officials who recently have started to consider the issuance of freehold property visas. This news was revealed of late by a top Dubai government official who said that introduction of residence visas on foreign property ownership in various emirates of the UAE was under serious consideration. The DG of Dubai Government’s Finance Department added that the proposal regarding issue of property-linked visas, which was put forward by the Advisory Council of Dubai Government, was under a review.
It should be kept in mind that some emirates, acting of their own accord, had already amended their foreign property ownership laws and developed their own freehold visa arrangements. The purpose of the proposed freehold property visas at the federal level is to streamline the process and set a unified guideline for the entire UAE. The Federal Government officials hope that the new law will be introduced soon but no timeline for the regulation’s introduction has yet been announced.
Even as Dubai’s rising expatriate population is being projected as a measure of its association with the outside world, many historians, media experts and political observers are looking at the same phenomenon with some concern these days. Very recently, an editorial in the Gulf News stated how eight out of every ten people living in the UAE were born abroad. This was expected to reach up to nine out of every ten by the year 2015. This scenario might become even more imbalanced by the year 2025, when the expatriate community will almost score ten out of every ten native citizens counted. This analysis is however hypothetical in kind, and there are factors overlooked by the author, which might actually decide a totally different demographic scenario in the years to follow.
First of all, the current crop of construction projects are expected to be over in the next 5 to 10 years, which will force up to 50% of the UAE’s expatriates to go back to their homelands. The expatriate population will still continue to remain quite significant though, as the properties being developed now will mostly by bought by the offshore clients later. The projected scenario of the Gulf News article can only arise, if the authorities kept announcing more and more new projects in the years to come. This could again be called a distant possibility, as no nation can ever dream of having an endless growth.