- REIDIN.com launches ‘INDEXFocus-UAE’ to improve transparency across the market and help real estate professionals benchmark and analyse residential price trends
The ‘Sales Price Index for Dubai’ (SPID) for residential properties (‘SPID – All Residential’) has risen by 0.7 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2009 as against Q3 2009 (base quarter 2003 Q1), according to figures released by REIDIN.com, the world’s first and leading global online information services provider. The figures have been computed via the company’s new online service – ‘INDEXFocus-UAE’, which is designed to allow accurate tracking of price fluctuations in the residential market. Launched in partnership with the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA) and Dubai Land Department (DLD), the new service provides the market with a series of indices and data sets that can help improve transparency across the market and help real estate professionals benchmark and analyse residential price trends.
‘INDEXFocus-UAE’ takes the latest information from the comprehensive database of REIDIN.com’s proprietary real estate indices and tools. According to the latest information released by the company, the ‘SPID – Villas’ (Base quarter 2003 Q1) rose by 2.6 per cent during the fourth quarter compared to the third in 2009, but has slid by 19.7 per cent versus the comparable period in 2008. Some of the 10 main districts covered by ‘INDEXFocus-UAE’ include ‘Palm Jumeirah’, where SPI – All Residential (Base quarter 2007Q1) increased by 2 per cent (Q4 versus Q3 2009). However, the quarterly SPI for both ‘Emirates Hills’ and ‘Jumeirah Lake Towers’ fell by 19 per cent during the same period (Base quarter 2004 Q1).
“REIDIN.com’s mission is to supply real estate professionals with online information services and tools that improve transparency across emerging markets, and ‘INDEXFocus’ is a significant step towards the realisation of this goal,” said
Ahmet Kayhan, CEO, REIDIN.com. “Given the dynamism of Dubai’s property market, we are confident that ‘INDEXFocus - UAE’ will provide analysts, investors, financiers and other real estate professionals with valuable market data analysis tools including accurate residential property benchmarks and trend analysis to help them grow their business. The unveiling of our latest offering in Dubai, following the successful launch of ‘INDEXFocus – Turkey’, underlines the product’s rapid evolution, and we are pleased to announce that we are currently working on a similar product for the Abu Dhabi market.”
Similar to the Turkey Real Estate Indices platform, which covers seven major cities of Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Izmit, Bursa, Adana and Antalya), ‘INDEXFocus-UAE’ compares house price indices with commodity prices (such as oil and gold), financial and economic indicators (such as inflation and interest rates) which are relevant to the real estate industry. The Dubai indices and calculations are based primarily on transaction records from DLD (powered by ‘DUBAIFocus’, REIDIN.com’s exclusive online information product for analysing real estate transactions in Dubai) and Property Listings through its partnership with RERA, using a proprietary moving average median series methodology solely developed in-house by REIDIN.com. The main districts and major communities and projects covered by ‘INDEXFocus-UAE’ include about 7 city-wide indices and a total of 19 district and project-based indices – ‘Business Bay’, ‘Downtown’, ‘Dubai Marina’, ‘Jumeirah Beach Residence’, and ‘The Greens’, among others.
“Ensuring the accuracy of market data and relevance to local market conditions is our top priority, which has prompted us to appoint an advisory committee, comprised of academicians and industry professionals from different emerging economies to monitor the quality of the indices. Furthermore, we have established a Property Indices Oversight Committee to be responsible for reviewing and recommending changes in index policies and procedures, required data elements, qualifying properties, monthly index production review and taking of any other actions deemed necessary to assure index statistical integrity,” concluded
Kayhan. 
