What’s upsetting most people these days is not that the temperature is rising, but that rents are once again moving north.
The moving truck is a common sight on Shaikh Zayed Road, piled high with personal belongings such as someone’s favourite beat-up couch and an old fridge with plastic sheets flapping around.
If you plot out anyone living in Dubai over the past years on a chart, it will seem like he or she was hiding from someone and changing addresses every year. “So, where are you living now?” I asked an office mate the other day, and he said, “Muhaisnah”.
The last time we spoke, he was living in Al Qusais, a suburb on the North-eastern edge of Dubai and bordering Sharjah, from where the commute to his workplace is not as bad.
Every now and then we see a truck parked in our driveway and a group of burly guys getting down. For the next hour or so, we hear screaming and tearing sounds, like when you rip open an industrial sticky tape and wrap it around large newspaper wrapped bundles. Apparently, someone in our building had got fed up paying the ever-climbing rent.
It is also bad luck to talk about rents nowadays when meeting someone, as if just talking about it could send telepathic signals to the landlord, waiting to slap that 20 per cent hike on you. If by chance the landlord has still not raised the rent, you say a silent prayer or do something that keeps the evil eye away and move on quickly to another topic of discussion.
I read somewhere the other day that landlords are sneakily increasing the rent, but that they are allowed the hike from between 5 to 20 per cent, but only if the rent in your area is below the market average. I tried finding out what the market average in my area should be, but nobody was telling me.
While people scramble for a cheaper place to stay, I looked up an expat blog and found this advert there: “Lady looking to share bed space”. A bed space is basically a bed in a room and if you are an evil landlord you make the most money out of your property by hiring out six or seven beds in a room.
Then one real estate agent said that now is a good time to own my own place. “Why rent when you can buy your own,” she explained. So many people were impressed with this line of thinking that when villas costing just Dh1 million was put up for sale, there was a near-riot and the cops had to be called.
People were said to be standing in queue from the night before and most of them were construction workers and labourers who supposedly were eager to get the property which was being sold on a first-come-first-serve basis.
This is what happened next according to an eyewitness: “Till 7am, everything was OK and then some people tried to crash the queue.” Things went out of hand after that, the police was called and then an ambulance as one woman fainted in the kerfuffle.
Money bags had apparently hired the poor labourers to wait in queue for them and once the sales started, they got into their spots. People were apparently “flipping” the villas and were selling them at a premium even as they came out after signing the papers.
“How come we never think of such money-making schemes,” I asked my wife. “I could have stood in line and you could have brought me a bowl of my favourite soup late in the night. We would have become rich,” I tell her as she gives me a strange look and hands me the grocery list.
