This is luxury
DAMAC managing director Ziad El Chaar reflects on the developer’s success
An artist’s imagining of the Burjside Boulevard Exterior, one of DAMAC’s flagship properties.
Walking the talk
With 50 projects currently under construction across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Cairo, Jordan, Lebanon and Qatar, DAMAC continues to shout about its achievements; in a way only its Middle East target market could possibly understand.
Earlier this year the luxury developer fully embraced the glitz culture of the Arabian world by pledging to give away luxury cars, speed boats and cash to its buyers during the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) an event world renowned for its lavish giveaways.
“We said it was important to do something like this to show the market is growing again because you cannot do such promotion if the market is not there. We have wanted to walk the talk that we gave at Cityscape 2011,” he clarifies.
Far from believing this to perpetuate the heady and financially excessive reputation of the UAE’s golden Emirate, El Chaar says it was all in the spirit of the season
He adds: “People like the giveaways here and this is why people come to Dubai. They like the summer surprises and the shopping festivals. It’s like one giant big circus and everybody loves the circus.”
People may love the circus, but like Dubai’s market it still has a shaky reputation for those who haven’t visited recently.
As a developer that has been around since the first upward curve in the early 2000s DAMAC is now using its international media pull to promote the UAE and wider region as an investor haven, with stable and protective legislation in addition to high levels of personal safety and generous salaries.
“We have not yet spread the word enough on how protected the market is here, so this is now part of a new plan that we have, to talk more and more about these laws in our brochures, on the website and in the media.
“Many people did not notice [these laws] in September 2008 because they had too many distractions around them to focus on something like this,” he adds.
