JBR apartments and Palm Island villas and flats hit the market

The Jumeirah Beach Residence is touted as the world's biggest ever single delivery of residential property with 6,500 apartments handed over this year. At the same time, hundreds of shoreline apartments on the nearby Palm Jumeirah are now ready for occupation and a similar number of villas.

This property is in the mid-to-luxury end of the Dubai real estate market, and the delay in delivering these schemes has meant a shortfall in supply to meet rising demand.

But now this huge volume of new property is ready for occupation. And at the other end of the scale the affordable apartments in Nakheel's even bigger International City are also coming on to the market.

Oversupply?

Will the supply and demand curve now tip decisively into oversupply? This is certainly what the pessimists about the outlook for Dubai property have long argued.

But the jury on this case will really be out until the autumn. Only in October, after the Holy Month of Ramadan will it become clear whether these apartments are selling, being let and achieving the high rentals that have become expected in Dubai.

The announcement of a one per cent down payment mortgage on JBR apartments from the Dubai Bank in association with Dubai Properties should help to find buyers for units that the developer has not yet sold.

The pessimists include some heavy hitters like EFG Hermes and Standard Chartered Bank, while ranked against them is the entire massed army of estate agents and Dubai developers who continue to energetically roll out new schemes as if demand was insatiable and supply always needed.

When the music stops somebody is going to be left with egg on their faces. But will that be this year, next year or sometime later?

End coming

No boom can possibly continue forever, and a real estate correction 18 months after the peaking of a local stock market bubble would be a typical cyclical pattern for an emerging market. That critical moment has just passed. Whether Dubai with its newly created freehold market can break this pattern for a while longer remains to be seen.

However, having this sort of doubt resting in the minds of investors can not be a good sign really, particularly with real estate markets from Spain to the US now in trouble. And it only needs a serious hesitation to make commitments to precipitate a correction.

For at the end of the day the market forces of supply and demand will dictate what happens to the Dubai property market, not the commentators, developers or estate agents. And if the demand is not there for the supply that will be an important turning point.