Palm Deira, Dubailand: new era for Dubai mega-projects

Biggest is not necessarily best, but for business the situation in Dubai just gets better and better. Larger projects mean more work for contractors, more opportunities for investors and more development spin-offs for the entire business community.

It was impossible to miss the launch of The Palm, Deira this week. The third palm-island is to be 14km long and 8.5km wide. This makes the project larger than New York's Manhattan, bigger than central Paris and almost as big as Greater London.

What a mega-project. Some one billion cubic metres of rock and sand will be moved to create the island which will provide the land for 8,000 villas, shopping malls, public facilities, leisure clubs and other amenities on its 41 fronds and 400km of new shoreline.

In the same week the developers of Dubailand chose to reveal that this mega-project is now going to involve a total investment of $9.5 billion over the next five years, up from initial estimates of $4.9 billion.

Indeed, some $4 billion has already been secured for 13 elements of the Dubailand project which is a composite theme park, tourism resort and real estate development.

The aim is to encourage the projected 15 million visitors to Dubai a year by 2010 to spend more time and money in the emirate. Considering that six million visitors will come to Dubai in 2004 this is not such an impossible target to reach, especially with the entire local industry focused on that target.

Dubai Sports City also gave a flavour of the sub-projects within Dubailand this week with its announcement of the Victory Heights complex of 800 villas around a golf course. The DSC is thus combining an attractive real estate development within its distinctive part of Dubailand alongside a golf course and its series of sports stadiums.

This was also the first real estate development in Dubai to be co-developed with Bahrain's First Islamic Investment Bank, better known for its US and UK real estate portfolios.

Money just continues to pour into Dubai mega-projects which are tapping into the ample liquidity of Middle East investors who are loathe to risk investments elsewhere and only too keen to find investment opportunities closer to home.

In the meantime, business can reap a rich harvest sown by the Dubai mega-projects, and investment on this scale is hard to slow down once it is started, so the good years now stretch a long way into the future.