Sunday, January 20, 2008

A nice little earner

There's a PS to my Friday posting on owning property in Dubai in today's EmBiz247 front-page report.

A senior official from the Land Department has clarified that buyers in what's known in Dubai as the secondary property market - that is, people not buying direct from the developer but from the current owner - do not have to pay a transfer fee to the developer.

Amazingly, that's been the practice in the past with developers charging between 1% and 3% of their original sale price. And along with maintenance fees that's been a very good source of additional income for them.

"There is no need to pay any transfer fee to master developers or sub-developers for secondary sales," said Mohammed Sultan Thani, the department’s director of development and marketing administration. "All the parties need to do is come and register their sales titles with us. All they have to bring is a no-objection certificate from the developer, which costs Dh500. They then pay a one per cent transfer fee to the department."

So that's another of the unacceptable areas of the real estate market cleared up.

I wonder whether it's always been the case and if not whether the rule is retrospective. A lot of people have paid a lot of money to master & sub-developers in the past - can they claim it back I wonder...

You'll find the story here.

3 comments:

i*maginate said...

seabee, I was wondering if you were aware of any apparent setting-up of some kind of publicly available legal 'doctrine' detailling tenant-landlord guidelines.

Apparently there was an article detailling this in the media 2-3 weeks ago, and this is being set up to alleviate some of the 'pressure' from the Rent Committee.

Seabee said...

i*maginate, I guess the new laws will be published at some stage, I suppose first in Arabic and later in English. I don't know anything about it yet - maybe there's something on a website...

i*maginate said...

I heard this news was published in "Time Out" but can't seem to find it online...

Well...I'll do some investigation!