Dubai’s persistent efforts to make the real estate market more transparent, as real estate gurus put it, will soon encompass rental listings.
The DLD has recently started cracking down on the multiple and phony listings of properties for sale, and may very well do the same in the rental market.
Firas Al Msaddi, CEO of Fam Properties, says that if they could just put the rental certificates in digital format, that would be an innovation. This will end the problem of the same rental property being listed by ten different brokers and in turn, confusion and a bad image for the market,” Al Msaddi said. “We anticipate that stricter rules for rental listings are only a matter of time.”
This year the DLD (Department of Land and Properties) along with RERA (Real Estate Regulatory Agency) have enforced some new rules that require all real estate agents to follow certain regulations in order to list a property for sale on the worldwide web. That goes for off-plan and ready as well – that reduces the amount of repetition on listings. Therefore, the market is somewhat truer as to what is available and there are fewer false advertisements.
Al Msaddi expressed how much these regulations have changed. There used to be a thousand in some areas, but now only a couple hundred. This contraction has made the marketplace a much more efficient place for buyers and sellers, in the sense that many of the distortions in the market have been removed.
The new regulations come with hefty penalties for non-compliance. Estate agents will be fined Dh50,000 if they don’t abide by the rules and Dh100,000 if they do it again. Even the DLD has penalized agencies for not following the guidelines.
Not only must brokers get DLD approval before they can advertise a property, but they must also take down online listings no more than 90 days after a property is sold. This way, no one gets false information about the book and people don’t buy it thinking they will get something different.
The multiple listing crackdown has also affected the online property portals, for whom the number of listings they can display (for a fee of course) is the essence of their existence. Some of the smaller gateways are going to go out of business because of no repeaters. “While the leading property portals may absorb the impact, smaller ones could face significant challenges,” said an industry insider.
