New villa community to come up in Jumeirah

H&H Investment & Development, a Dubai-based property management and development company, is betting high on the non-freehold areas in Dubai and is currently working on developing a villa community in Jumeirah.
 
“We are working on a residential villa community project in Jumeriah. There will be around 20 to 25 high-end villas along with some retail components. The project is in the design stage,” Shahab Lutfi, Chief Executive Officer, H&H Investment & Development, told Emirates 24|7.

“There are a number of landlords who own land for 20 years now… their cost of land is minimum. And so if you can actually convince them and design a villa that actually commands a price… we believe they will be able to achieve decent returns in today’s market.”

Real estate experts say villas in Jumeirah have been in great demand mostly from GCC nationals. With the unrest in the Middle East region, the demand has soared recently and average rents now range between Dh200,000 and Dh350,000.

According to Lutfi, his company has stopped doing or developing projects in freehold area.

“We actually stopped investing in projects a while back… we are only doing management services and are concentrating on non-freehold areas such as Bur Dubai or Deira… these locations are still very lucrative and you can almost get an occupancy rate of 80 to 85 per cent after completion.”

New project on The World

H&H Investment is also currently working on the design of a residential project close to the D51 island on The World, Lutfi revealed.

“We are working on one now… a residential project for an island close to D51.”

The project is a third party project and the company will be overseeing the development of the project if the owners of the island decide to go ahead with the project.
 
Asked if it makes sense to launch a project now, he added: “It all depends your target market. You have to study thoroughly and have to structure it properly… if you have the right structure it could work and so we are assessing the project now.”

“One of the problems of The World is that most of the buyers have not completed their payments and so we are only dealing with people who have paid in full.”

Lutfi did not reveal more details of the project, but said his company plans to reuse some of old designs for the new project.

dxb-lab Architecture, a sister concern of H&H Investment, was working on Venture Capital Bank’s D51 project. The project was 70 to 75 per cent completed in terms of design and had the initial approval from the conerned authorities.

“The project was worth Dh500 million and in today’s market it is not easy to do a project worth that investment. And so we decided it does not make any sense now because of the funding purposes and not because the project is not going to be nice,” he added.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.