Dubai
The number of cases appearing before Dubai’s Rental Dispute Centre (RDC) has stabilised, according to one of the judges at the Centre.
“We are hearing about 5,000 cases a year and that’s on the lower side if you take into account Dubai’s resident base of 2.48 million,” said Judge Omar Miran, Secretary-General of RDC. “It usually averages one to two months for all the legal processes related to settling rental disputes, taking into account the 15 days that are given for issuing legal notices.
“We are working on ways to reduce the length of the process further — through service trustees, online processing, via our dedicated Rental Dispute Centre app and its ‘Smart Judge’ feature.”
It was in 2014 that the Rental Dispute Centre became the key agency to handle all such disputes. What this did was create a single window redressal centre and with an emphasis on speedy judgments. It was quite a departure from the more staid approach that the civil courts tend to follow.
“With our app, verdicts can even be delivered in a single day,” Miran said. “The app pieces together multiple situations that a landlord and the tenant may find themselves in, and a judge passes a finding according to the case’s merits.
“Our intention is use the multiple channels to reduce the need for the parties involved to physically make themselves available at the centre.”