Apartments at Damac’s $6bn Akoya project are ‘technically all sold out’, said a senior Damac executive.
“The midrise apartment are technically all sold out,” Ziad El Chaar, managing director at Damac Properties told Construction Week. “We have three buildings in around 480 units, we still have something between 20 to 30 units for sale.”
“Out of these, four of them [are] show flats which we cannot sell because we are using them for future projects to see what we are delivering.”
A two-bedroom apartment at Akoya’s midrise apartments, with a full view of the Golf Course, costs around $544,000 (AED2m), he said.
“We will start inviting people to come and live here by September [2016],” he added. “Most buyers are not residents and they won’t come in July or August.”
“Part of our delivery schedule for 2016 [is that] we are going to be handing over Akoya’s first 800 to 900 villas out of the 2,145 villas,” El Chaar said, adding that more than half of these houses are now ready to be handed over.
The Dubai-based developer bought a 42 million square feet plot of land near Arabian Ranches in July 2013, and have been working on the development of villas, midrise apartment buildings, Damac Maison hotel apartments and a retail strop – amongst other facilities.
Despite being “technically sold out”, the Dubai developer reported a 33 percent decline in year-on-year sales for the first quarter of 2016 as buyers adopted a watch-and-see approach.
Revenue fell to $441m (AED1.62bn) compared with $653m (AED2.4bn) a year earlier. Net profit also dropped by 15 percent to $408m (AED1.05bn). The developer booked $544 (AED2bn) worth of off-plan sales during the quarter – a drop of 28 percent on the same period last year.
Damac said booked sales were flat quarter-on-quarter and were 5 percent higher than at their recent low point in the third quarter of last year.
