When looking for property in Dubai, there is one simple rule of thumb: if they have already started building it, then it’s probably already sold. That, at least, is how it seems to Daniel Simpson, a property consultant at Landmark Properties, one of the emirate’s numerous estate agents.

After a quick tour through a little cluster of pristine show homes, optimistically named the Street of Dreams, we are down by the marina (under construction) in a large hall dominated by a huge architect’s model. Although most of the buildings depicted are little more than concrete skeletons, most of them, too, have been snapped up — many by Brits.

“About a year and a half ago, when one of the developments was released for sale, people queued all night, and they sold 900 houses in seven hours,” says Simpson. “Things have calmed down a bit. But you still get developments that sell out in a day.”

Anybody who thinks eastern European markets are hot should come to sweltering Dubai. This former fishing village turned wannabe desert megalopolis is experiencing a property boom that takes the breath away.

They don’t just put up tower blocks in modest ones and twos here — they knock ’em up by the dozen, with armies of Third World labourers toiling around the clock to finish 70- or 80-storey monsters of glass and concrete in record time.

Some 75,000 new units are under way or have been completed in Dubai, the most exclusive of them on three palm-shaped islands and the even more spectacular The World — 250 islands that form the shape of all the countries on the planet. Such is the pace of change that a part of the city known as the Old Town hasn’t been built yet. And then, there are all the architectural superlatives that go with it — the Burj Al Arab (the world’s first seven-star hotel), plans for the tallest skyscraper, the first underwater hotel, biggest shopping mall and longest inside ski slope (no mean feat with temperatures that hit 43C in summer).

Things began to move three years ago — aeons ago in Dubai time. Until then, only the locals, who make up fewer than one in five of Dubai’s almost 1.5m people, had been able to buy property. Conscious the oil was running out, Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, the crown prince, set out to turn Dubai into the financial, commercial and tourism capital of the Middle East.

Certain areas, largely to the west of the creek that runs through the middle of the original city, were designated as suitable for foreigners to buy in, and parcels of land handed out to local developers. Soon afterwards, the tower blocks began to go up.

Anybody who put down a deposit on a property in the early days found it had risen in value by as much as 60% even before it was finished. Richard Sealey, a technical consultant from Windsor, was among them. Last summer, he bought a three-bed villa in the Arabian Ranches district from the developer for £160,000. It won’t be ready until August, but he recently saw a similar one on sale for £290,000.

“It is quite scary how things are moving out there,” says Sealey. “Property is just going through the roof. They can’t put them up quickly enough. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon.”

Not surprisingly, speculators have had a field day, putting down an initial 10% or so and selling on a few months later for a handsome profit. Some flats can be “flipped” half a dozen times even before the builders have left. In an attempt to cool the market — and secure a piece of the action — some developers have started levying a transfer fee of up to 7% of the finished price to anybody selling on before completion.

Old habits die hard, though: if you buy a flat on the “secondary market”, rather than from a developer, part of the price you pay will be the “premium” — a mark-up of anything from 10%-70% of the launch price, depending on the development’s popularity. This is of more than academic interest: to protect themselves against a market collapse, many banks will lend only against the launch price, leaving you to finance the premium yourself.

So how attractive is Dubai to somebody buying now? Most experts expect prices to continue rising, albeit not at the hectic levels seen in the past, underpinned by high immigration from Europe, elsewhere in the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent.

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