Quick-Silverine

Cayan chief development officer Ahmad Kasem.

It is rare to find a developer in the current climate that would not look back on the past five years in Dubai with happy memories, and a wish to have its time again. But for Saudi Arabia-based Cayan, which is overseeing a number of projects in the city including Silverene in Dubai Marina, the boom time is now.

Cayan chief development officer Ahmad Kasem is sat in his temporary office on the site of the Silverene project in Dubai Marina. A diagram is pinned to the wall over his shoulder, with the progress that has been made on the towers to date highlighted.

Tower A, which when complete will stand at 34 storeys, and Tower B, which will stand at 26 storeys, have both reached the 14th floors to date, and work is continuing at pace.

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“The progress that has been made to date is a big accomplishment,” Kasem says. This may at first glance appear to be a veiled reference to the financial crisis that has slowed so many projects, while others have ground to a halt altogether.

But regardless of boom or bust, the progress made at Silverene has been impressive – the project only broke ground eight months ago. This is not only a very short period in the total build-time of your average multi-storey twin-tower block, but, as a quick glance at the calendar shows, Cayan broke ground at virtually the same time that the financial crisis decided to rear its ugly head in Dubai.

The main contractor on the US $182 million (AED670 million) project, Arabtec Construction, has ploughed on with construction of both towers, employing around 1,250 labourers on site, unhindered by the payment wrangles that have affected other projects.

Kasem puts this down to the business model of Cayan which he says remains similar for all of the Saudi Arabia-based developer’s projects, regardless of location.

“The minute that a lot of our projects are designed, we sell a large portion of them,” Kasem says. “Then, we go after delivery, so the speed hasn’t changed at Silverene since we broke ground.” Completion is set for October 2010. “I see nothing to stop us meeting our deadline,” says Kasem. “Nothing at all.”

In the case of Silverene, Cayan began its sales cycle safely before a mortgage in Dubai became rarer than a taxi driver who knows where he’s going. But even so, as Kasem explains to us in his office, the firm, which has three projects ongoing in Dubai, takes care not to get its hands tied up in ill-advised development.

“We do a lot of planning,” he says. “When we conduct our feasibility studies we make sure that there is a need for a proposed project before we go ahead with it. We could have sold our ongoing Dubai projects in no time.”

Some have raised the potential problem of over-supply in Dubai, particularly in the high-end residential sector, as a declining population coupled with the continuation of units being released to the market combine to knock the supply and demand scales out of kilter.