Thursday, March 16, 2006

Dubailand shelves new projects :: Hyderabad

Quote:
Located around 20 km from the centre of the city, Dubailand was initially billed as the biggest leisure-based development on the planet.

Original designs included 45 main projects and 200 sub-projects, along with 55 hotels and resorts offering up to 50,000 new rooms.

Among the 21 projects to have been given the go-ahead are the $1.5 billion (AED 5.5 billion) theme park, Legends Dubailand, the $1 billion City of Arabia, including the Restless Planet dinosaur park, and the $540 million Dubai Sports City. Other projects approved include the $136 million Dubai Sunny Mountain Ski Dome and the $231 million Aqua Dunya.

While the project freeze will come as a blow to contractors and consultants who are hoping to win work on the Dubailand development, it will be welcomed by real estate players fearful of an oversupply of residential and retail space hitting the Dubai market. An official close to the project said that some of the ventures proposed since the development was announced went 'off the scale'.

"Many were unfeasible and inpractical — the numbers just didn't work, and they were simply shrouded by the glitz of the idea."
. . .
"I don't see it having a detrimental impact on development in general," said Ian Albert, director of Colliers UAE. "On the positive side, it allows for the rest of the projects in Dubailand to get started, and hopefully finished on time.

It will also remove some of the internal competition and allow other mega-projects in Dubai to move forward — we need to get on with projects like Business Bay, the Palms, Dubai Waterfront, and, more importantly, the Jebel Ali Airport — this is crucial to the future of Dubai. "There's also enough residential supply coming onto the market at the moment for this not to be affected, and there's enough demand to pace that supply."

The future success of Dubailand is hinged on the number of people the various attractions will draw in. These attractions range from a giant water park and a London Eye-style big wheel, to a ski dome and Dubai Sports City, which will feature four giant stadiums designed to accommodate international sporting events and academies, and, maybe one day, the Olympics Games.

6 Comments:

Blogger secretdubai said...

Let's see if they can manage to gag this newspaper as well.

They already forced ITP to pull this story from their website, and I know of at least one other publisher who was forced to pull reports about it.

I've been itching to blog it since late last year when I first found out about it. Sources have told me that Dubailand has a current total freeze on interviews, so it will be interesting to see how they respond if the local press here picks up the Hyderabad story. Though I doubt they will dare.

1:21 AM  
Blogger John B. Chilton said...

SD,

Your comment posting elsewhere inspired my Hyderabad posting. Unsure you wanted to promote the connection, I didn't give the standard hat tip thank you.

JC

9:58 AM  
Blogger nzm said...

Blogged about it here back in early Feb. Link to 7 Days article is still working.

11:49 PM  
Blogger secretdubai said...

Spoke with an associate, and Dubailand won't actually confirm or deny. All they will do is issue a press release about billions of projects going ahead, not effectively tackling the question of whether some/any have been cancelled.

So I think we can pretty much take it as read that they have. And that there are serious problems.

12:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Emirates Ecnomist is doing a very good project in A P lot of peoples will get good job after this project the status of the state will become to metropolitan but nobody dont know where this project is comming and wat all companies r commig in this

by shanif & Nidhin
service engineers
itsnidhil@gmail.com
shanif_mohd@yahoo.com

10:04 PM  
Blogger sapna said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

11:45 AM  

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