• The master plan of the three Palm developments. The Palm Jumeirah consists of a tree trunk, a crown with 17 fronds, and a crescent-shaped island with an 11km breakwater.
• Image Credit: Supplied picture

Dubai : The Palm Jumeirah is the first in the Palm trilogy of artificial islands in Dubai, on which major commercial and residential infrastructures are being constructed.

The island was reclaimed by Nakheel, a property developer that has hired Belgian and Dutch dredging and marine contractor Jan De Nul and Van Oord — some of the world's specialists in land reclamation — for the prestigious project.

The other islands in the trilogy include Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Each settlement in the Palm Jumeirah is set to be in the shape of a palm tree, topped with a crescent.

These will have a large number of residential, leisure and entertainment centres.

The first two islands' reclamation comprised approximately 100 million cubic metres of rock and sand. The creation of the Palm Jumeirah began in June 2001. Shortly after, the Palm Jebel Ali was announced and its reclamation work began too.

The Palm Deira, which is planned to have a surface area of 46.35 square kilometres, was announced for development in October 2004.

The construction was originally planned to take 10-15 years, but that was before the impact of the global credit crunch hit Dubai.

The Palm Islands are artificial peninsulas constructed using sand from the bottom of the Gulf.

The sand is sprayed by the dredging ships onto the required area in a process known as rainbowing.

Special effects

The outer edge of each Palm's encircling crescent is a large rock breakwater.

The breakwater of the Palm Jumeirah has over seven million tonnes of rock. Each rock was placed individually by a crane, signed off by a diver and given a GPS coordinate.

The Jan De Nul Group started working on the Palm Jebel Ali in 2002 and commenced work by the end of 2006.

The reclamation project for the Palm Jebel Ali included the creation of a four kilometre peninsula, protected by a 200-metre-wide, 17 kilometre circular breakwater.

Around 210 million cubic metres of rock, sand and limestone were reclaimed.

There are approximately 10 million cubic metres of rock in the slope protection works.

The Palm Jumeirah can be seen from the International Space Station.

It consists of a tree trunk, a crown with 17 fronds, and a surrounding crescent-shaped island that forms an 11 kilometre breakwater.

The island itself is five kilometres by five kilometres with an additional 78 kilometres added to the Dubai coastline.

The Palm Jumeirah has already created 4,000 residences in a combination of villas and apartments.

Residents began moving into their Palm Jumeirah properties at the end of 2006, five years after land reclamation began.

This signalled the end of phase one of the island's construction.

This includes approximately 1,400 villas on 11 of the fronds of the island and roughly 2,500 shoreline apartments in 20 buildings on the east side of the trunk.

Report sees green shoots of recovery in sector amid measures to soften impact of slowdown

Dubai: Decreasing real estate prices and rental rates are likely to "adversely affect" Dubai's nominal GDP growth rates in the real estate and construction sectors in 2009 and "possibly beyond", but green shoots of recovery are beginning to sprout in the sector, the emirate's Department of Finance said in a supplementary prospectus on a new bond issue, filed to the London Stock Exchange.

The Dubai Government has moved decisively to counteract a softening of the property and construction sectors since the middle of 2008, when the aftermath of the global financial crisis created negative sentiment in the UAE.

Since that time, a number of real estate projects in Dubai have been cancelled or delayed, principally reflecting liquidity shortages for developers, decreasing headline real estate prices and rental rates and increasing market uncertainty and negative sentiment.

Of the 980 projects in Dubai registered with the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera), 46 projects have been completed and another 307 are expected to be completed. As many as 495 registered projects have either been cancelled by RERA or are in the process of being cancelled.

Reflecting the global financial crisis and sharp falls in international oil and gas prices in 2008 and 2009, there have been significant declines in real estate sales prices and rental rates, resulting in a slowdown in construction activity on some announced projects in the UAE.

"These factors are likely to adversely impact GDP in 2009 and potentially in subsequent years," the document says.

Colliers International reported that rental rates in the Dubai residential market declined by 25 per cent between the second quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, although the report states that rental rates in Dubai have since stabilised in selected developments and, in certain instances, have staged a marginal recovery.

With respect to sales of residential property, in the second quarter of 2010 the Colliers House Price Index (HPI) registered a 7 per cent growth over average sale prices for the second quarter of 2009.

In contrast, Jones Lang LaSalle reported that the number of residential transactions increased by 49 per cent in the second quarter of 2010 from the first quarter of 2010, with the value of such transactions increasing by 50 per cent.

"Dubai has evolved from a regional to a global city, and property is often the enabler for other sectors to emerge,"

Shift in focus

"We've moved from a construction-focused sector to one that is more oriented towards services and management. Hospitality too has over time become less about building and more about services."

The number of real estate transactions recorded by the Land Department has also dropped, from 5,916 in 2008 to 2,327 the following year.

However, a number steps taken by the Dubai Government to re-instil confidence in its property and construction sectors has resulted in signs of recovery.

For the first half of 2010, the Land Department reported 1,188 sale transactions, compared to 510 sale transactions in the second half of 2009, an increase of about 132 per cent.

Source: Gulf News.