Rising Dubai land values boost worth of Kuwait's IFA

Rising Dubai land values helped Kuwaiti resort developer IFA Hotels & Resorts, almost double the value of its investment portfolio during the first quarter of the year.

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Rising Dubai land values helped the Kuwaiti resort developer IFA Hotels & Resorts almost double the value of its investment portfolio during the first quarter of the year.

The company, which owns the recently opened Fairmont on the trunk of the Palm and the under- construction Kingdom of Sheba hotel on the crescent, said the value of the resorts it owns increased from 30.5 million Kuwaiti dinars (Dh391m) to 59.8m dinars in the year to the end of March.

IFA said the increase had been driven by a revaluation gain of 19.9m dinars of its property in Dubai and Portugal and by the reclassification of the soon-to-be-completed Kingdom of Sheba as an investment property rather than a work in progress at a value of 8.8m dinars.

Property prices on the Palm fell nearly 70 per cent during the global financial crisis to about Dh650 per square foot in 2011, analysts reported. However, since then they have been rising steadily.

Last November Nakheel sold a 155,000 square foot hotel plot on the trunk of the Palm equating to Dh1,303 per square foot.

According to the broker Asteco, villa prices on the Palm were the most expensive in the city during the first quarter of the year at Dh1,899 per sq ft. The revaluations came as good news to IFA, which is partly owned by the Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, which filed net profits of 1.7m dinars from a loss of 4.8m dinars during the same period last year.

Earlier this month rumours circulated that IFA was in talks to sell a stake of the five-star 381-room Fairmont Hotel on the trunk of the Palm, which opened in January.