UAE | Traffic and Transport

Sharjah used car dealers call for proper facilities

Used car dealers caution that moving them out of the Abu Shagara residential area without providing proper facilities will affect business worth millions of dirhams.

  • By Mahmood Saberi, Staff Reporter
  • Published: 00:00 May 7, 2006
  • Gulf News

Sharjah: Used car dealers caution that moving them out of the Abu Shagara residential area without providing proper facilities will affect business worth millions of dirhams.

"We keep hearing every year that we will be moved somewhere near Sharjah Airport. But nobody knows where it is," said Thaier Belbaisi, manager of a luxury car dealership.

He said if the Municipality moved them far away without providing facilities, dealers would go home, taking the millions of dirhams they have invested in their businesses with them.

A senior Municipal official was quoted as saying that a new used car mart was being built at Riqqa Al Hamara near the airport.

None of the dealers said they had heard of any move by the Municipality to relocate them there.

"The government should sit with us and ask us what we need," said Belbaisi, who believes that an ideal location would be near Port Hamriyah for easy transshipment.

Sharjah's used car market is the oldest and the largest in the Middle East. Over 500 used car dealers are located here.

Difficult

Second-hand cars are shipped here from Japan and Germany and shipped out to other GCC countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Today it sits in the middle of a residential area, making it extremely difficult for people living there to find a parking space or move about in their neighbourhood.

In the evenings dealers sit alongside the road on plastic chairs and stop motorists to haggle over prices, creating traffic jams.

"Residents cannot move, they have no freedom," said Bassem Boureslan, owner of Adhwa used cars, who said he would be very glad to move.

"But give us something similar if not the same as Al Aweer (the used car mart in Dubai)," he said.

Eight years ago the Sharjah government offered dealers of right-hand drive vehicles the choice to move to Al Aweer and open dealerships without local sponsorship. More than 300 dealers took up the offer.

A Pakistani dealer said that although rents are rising every year, the facilities offered to them are nil. He said unhappy residents sometimes scratched the paint off the cars in anger.

Some of the dealers however, do not want to move out saying this district is near the industrial area where cars can be sent easily for repair. But unlike the Dubai dealers, the Sharjah car dealers have no association and cannot fight for their rights.

Belbaisi says if auction facilities such as those in Japan were offered here he could guarantee the sale of one car every hour.

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