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The Pink Ponies have Abandoned Dubai, Too

The_TimThe_Tim
edited March 2009 in Seattle Real Estate
Sound familiar?

High-flying Dubai coming back to Earth
A few months ago, America Harris was marketing real estate with the promise that Dubai would continue to prosper.

The North Lauderdale, Fla., native would show prospective clients articles from the local English-language newspaper that claimed Dubai was still a good investment even as most of the world's real-estate markets were faltering.

"Dubai was going to be unfazed by the financial crisis. It was resilient," Harris said one recent afternoon.

But last month, she and dozens of her colleagues lost their jobs. This city of skyscrapers and man-made island resorts had become the latest victim of the global financial crisis.
Seriously, it's like I'm reading an article about Seattle from about six months ago.

Comments

  • The_TimThe_Tim
    This thread seems like a good place to highlight this article from the Wall Street Journal: Downturn Catches Up to Seattle
    ... median home values in the Seattle area were among the country's last to fall, starting a slide in the fourth quarter of 2007 and only dipping into double-digit declines in the fourth quarter of last year, according to estimates by Zillow Inc., a Seattle-based real-estate Web site. That was two years after median home values began to fall in the San Francisco area and one year after they began to drop in the U.S. as a whole, according to Zillow.

    "I can't tell you how many times in the past year I heard people say, 'Yeah, but Seattle's different,' when the topic of the housing market came up," said Amy Bohutinsky, a Zillow spokeswoman.
    ...
    There are some visible signs of the downturn, in the form of stalled building projects blemishing many of Seattle's picturesque neighborhoods -- a jarring sight in a place where the whirring of power tools was a constant presence in the construction sites that seemed to spring up in every crevice of the city.

    A block away from the fish and flower stalls of the iconic Pike Place Market there is a hole in the ground nearly the size of a city block, where a hotel and condominium project has stalled. The project, led by developer Starwood Capital Group Global LLC, is on hold indefinitely because of the credit crisis, according to people familiar with the matter.
  • kpomkpom
    I assumed months ago that Dubai was headed for the Big Fall - an incredibly indebted nation building all these swank high-end hotels and other facilities, based on the implicit assumption that the oil boom was going to go on forever. A monument to the Bubble.

    Besides, the major flaw in trying to turn Dubai into a World Financial Center was that Dubai may look pretty enticing if you live in Saudi Arabia, but not so much if you live in New York or London. They were having real problems convincing high-end financial types that they wanted to live in Dubai. (Today, of course, a lot of unemployed financiers would happily live in Dubai, but the jobs are no longer there.)
  • mukohmukoh
    I think the best aricle on Dubai was the one that had 3000+ cars left abandoned at the airport as people fly out without paying there debt to never return. As in Dubai there is actually a jail sentence for even bouncing a check.
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