Abu Dhabi’s largest property developer has announced plans to build more than 1,000 villas on Yas Island.
Aldar Properties unveiled plans for Yas Acres, a Dh6 billion project of 1,315 new villas which it plans to build on the northern shores of Yas Island alongside a golf course, club house, parks and schools.
At a press conference yesterday in the build-up to Cityscape Abu Dhabi, Aldar said that the 811,108 square metre villa project would be aimed at expatriates and locals who were looking for villas in the Dh3 million to Dh5m price bracket.
“At the moment buyers in Abu Dhabi don’t have much choice when it comes to villas,” said Greg Fewer, Aldar’s chief financial officer. “They can either buy on Saadiyat where there is a very good product but the prices are very high, or they can buy in Al Reef, which is also a very good product but aimed at a more mass-market demographic. At the moment there isn’t anything in between and we believe there is a real demand for it.”
Aldar said that the villas would range between three-bedroom town houses which it planned to sell for Dh2.9m to huge palaces with undisclosed prices. It said that the average price for a three-bedroom town house worked out at about Dh1,100 per square foot – slightly lower than the Dh1,250 per sq ft at which Cluttons estimates current villa prices stand.
Aldar said it would fund the development from its own cash reserves and through off-plan sales. The company said that it would not start selling off- plan villas at Cityscape, but that it planned to hold a separate sales launch later in the year.
Yas Acres, which is scheduled to start on site almost immediately and is expected to complete at the end of 2019, will be Aldar’s largest and most ambitious project to be attempted since the heady days before the global financial crisis.
The Aldar chairman Abubaker Seddiq Al Khoori, said that he was confident enough to press ahead with such a large project despite the gloomy economic climate in Abu Dhabi caused by low oil prices and a swath of job losses and other cutbacks for three reasons.
“Despite falling oil prices, all five of the projects that we have launched so far have been very successful and have sold faster than we anticipated,” he said. “Aldar has had a very balanced strategy and has not rushed out and built too many projects or too many units. And thirdly there are still a lot of our projects due to be completed over the next two or three years which are government projects, and which are driving growth in the economy.”
lbarnard@thenational.ae
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