DAMAC boss on A-list approach to real estate and future of Dubai’s market

Dubai February 1st, 2014: – Heading to the stores to try to bag a Dubai Shopping Festival bargain? If Ziad El Chaar gets his way, you might be headed home with a bigger purchase than you’d planned.

“You are going to the mall, thinking, ‘I’m going to have a coffee and possibly shop in one store.’ But then I convince you to buy an apartment,” he says. And the managing director of major UAE developer DAMAC Properties is particularly focused on the thousands of foreign guests visiting the emirate for its annual retail extravaganza – in fact, he’s waiting for them when they step off the plane.

“My advertising starts at the airport,” he says. And you can’t go far in Dubai without seeing one of the firm’s sales kiosks or huge advertising billboards. Depending on which of the company’s high-profile developments is being sold, it could be Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn or Donald Trump imploring you to buy a DAMAC home. If that doesn’t do it, then DAMAC’s promotion for DSF promises homebuyers a free Lamborghini, BMW or Mini depending their purchase.

“You are trying to convince a visitor on a short break to buy property. So that person needs an incentive,” El Chaar says. Cynics may roll their eyes at such schemes, but he says: “There is no success in real estate development without a proper and continuous investment in sales and marketing.”

He has a point: aside from Emaar, Nakheel and DAMAC, how many Dubai developers can you name? Besides, El Chaar says, getting someone to buy property in Dubai these days really isn’t a tough sell. “Our first pitch is not DAMAC, it’s Dubai,” he says.

“You have to tell them what the city is all about.” That can be anything from its schools, its many nationalities or free zones. And after three years of strife across the Arab world, El Chaar is noticing another driver. “So many things we just take for granted, like safety and security,” he says. The Lebanese executive adds: “But if I go back to my home country at night I have to check if the door is locked. Twice.”

DAMAC has luxury developments in various stages of completion across the region and has announced plans for a plush apartment block in Baghdad. But the firm is most active in Dubai and is currently developing 5,000 ‘keys’ within sight of the Burj Khalifa.

He calls Downtown “the Manhattan of Arabia”. Dubai has certainly come a long way from one of El Chaar’s earliest visits in 1995, when he says people would drive to catch a glimpse of the new, long, escalator in the newly opened Crowne Plaza hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road. If the views of world’s tallest building don’t float your boat, DAMAC has added a host of big names to its projects.

Its AKOYA golf community is backed by none other than ‘The Donald’. El Chaar says US billionaire Trump “is very much excited to do more business in Dubai”. The company has a tie-up with luxury fashion brand Fendi to deliver designer villas. Why?

“You have people who only buy a watch or a car if it is a limited edition. We are giving them limited series real estate.” Soaring prices, expensive interiors and Trump – you might think the crisis never happened. Not so, says El Chaar, who still carries the scars of that bust.

“Starting in the summer of 2008, we saw the decline in sales. And we saw more defaults also on the side of customers,” he remembers. “We started cutting in October – 15 days after [the collapse of] Lehman Brothers. We saw trouble ahead.” But what does the man selling properties branded with the name of film giant Paramount say to those who look at Dubai’s soaring property market and think ‘we’ve seen this movie before’?

“I don’t believe that five years from today we are going to look back and say ‘oh, this is 2008 coming back again’. For one simple reason: regulation. Back then we were in a six-year-old market. Now we have one of the most transparently regulated markets in the region. This should provide some sort of roadmap to a recovery, proper growth and proper stability.”

LIVE AND LEARN
Name : Ziad El Chaar
Firm : DAMAC Properties
Position : Managing director

Q WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB? A – I entered university at 17½ and started working at 18. The American University of Beirut. And the first job the university gave me was in the cataloguing department of the library. There was no internet at that time – you had to write out the card and put it in the drawer. But throughout my university years I was mainly a salesperson. I used to sell a lot of items to afford my studies.

Q WHO HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST INFLUENCE ON YOUR CAREER? A – The biggest influence on my career has always been the drive to do something unusual. Same thing with real estate – we are trying to put a different offering on the market and trying to sell it differently.

Q WHAT HAS BEEN THE BEST DAY OF YOUR CAREER? A – I’m a salesperson, so this day never comes. You are continuously working for this day to happen.

Q HOW DO YOU RELAX? A – Relaxation comes when you succeed. Once you succeed and you are pleasing people around you and you feel that you have created something positive, you will relax.

Q WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE SOMEONE STARTING OUT IN YOUR INDUSTRY? A – Start early. When you start having a proper career and a proper job, you get told a lot of things: ‘you need to do this and you need to do that’. When you are doing it straight out of university, you are just experimenting and you get to know what works and what doesn’t work.