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Emaar reschedules mortgage repayments
Faced with the difficulty of securing home loans from banks and finance companies amid the liquidity crunch, cust-omers of Emaar Properties have been given a breather in terms of extending the time for repayment of mortgages, a senior official of the company told Gulf News on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
- By Gaurav Ghose, Financial Features Editor
- Published: 23:20 November 7, 2008
Dubai: Faced with the difficulty of securing home loans from banks and finance companies amid the liquidity crunch, cust-omers of Emaar Properties have been given a breather in terms of extending the time for repayment of mortgages, a senior official of the company told Gulf News on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
Eisam Galadari, chief executive and managing director of Emaar Dubai's international operations, said the company introduced the facility one week ago and intends to continue it until the situation eases.
The UAE government stepped in injecting Dh120 billion to ease banks' liquidity squeeze.
"The credit crisis faced by the banks has made it difficult for our cust-omers," said Galadari. "Extending the time will help them to pay their money. Earlier banks used to give loans on the same day the application was made. But now they have become very cautious. It's hard to get a loan. It takes more than a month to get a loan."
Sold out
In the overall context of the ongoing and announced projects, he added that there is no slowdown in sales and most of the units have already been sold out.
Talking about global acquisitions in markets which have seen a meltdown and valuation has dropped, particularly in the US and Europe, Galadari said the company is following the news on the sectors affected, but is not looking at anything at the moment.
"The prices may come down further and we will wait," he said. "Right now we are not interested."
Emaar Properties reported a net profit of Dh1.51 billion for the third quarter of this year, down 3.2 per cent from Dh1.56 billion reported during the same period last year. Emaar attributed the lower net profit for the first nine months of the year to a Dh750-million write off relating to the acquisition of John Laing in the US.
John Laing's performance was adversely affected by the US mortgage crisis. Emaar bought John Laing for $1.05 billion in June 2006.
Reuters reported that Galadari said Emaar was planning to launch two projects in Dubai worth $5 billion (Dh18.35 billion) each, subject to market conditions.
"We have to rely on these [financial] institutions... they are financing our customers and we have pre-sales," he said.
Galadari said the group was "watching the market", but had yet to cancel or put back any projects.
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