Dubai's 425m tall Marina 101 gets ready after 20 years

Dubai: The wait could soon be over for apartment owners at the Marina 101, one of Dubai’s tallest buildings and which launched in the mid-2000s with some of the city’s most expensive freehold units at the time.

Work on the tower Dubai Marina will soon be over, according to some of the property owners, which should pave the way for handovers to start soon. According to some of them, the actual completion might well have taken place. Some of the owners, who had paid millions on their apartments and penthouses, have been waiting for years for such a day.

“We need RERA (Real Estate Regulatory Agency) to issue all the final approvals,” said one investor, who had paid over Dh2 million for a Marina 101 unit back in 2017. “All the years of wait will have been worth it if I can have the handover soon. I don’t intend to sell the unit, at least for now.”

The skyscraper, featuring 101 floors and climbing to 425 meters, faced multiple project and cost related delays at multiple points over the years. A project by Sheffield Real Estate, the launch was an immediate success, where it managed to make full use of the peak demand during Dubai’s first freehold boom of 2005 to mid-2008. Then came the Global Financial Crisis, and construction took an immediate hit.

Since then, the project was revived at multiple times in the last decade, and actually proceeded quite briskly at one point. It went on to hit the 97% completion mark, which was when it stalled all over again. The developer had run up a sizeable debt load by that time.

The banks got involved - with the lead one being India's Bank of Baroda - and on their own initiative tried to recoup some of their exposures to Sheffield.

In fact, the hotel components within Marina 101, which takes up 33 floors, was sold via an auction a couple of years ago.

“But the issue was that the entire building was yet to be complete, with that 3% work still left before a ‘building completion certificate’ could be issued,” said one of the owners in Marina 101. “Hopefully, when that’s done, you could soon have new residents as well as a busy hotel at some point.

“It’s only because top RERA officials gave their full backing to get this project completed that we are now at this point.

“2025, I hope, should deliver us our homes in the Marina 101.”

Through the last 4 years, several Marina 101 apartments had come up for a resale, with the Bayut portal now showing listings for a one-bedroom at Dh1.5 million and a two-bedroom for Dh2.7 million.

Any future price appreciation will require some clarity on the hotel part, which takes up 33 levels, and what sort of changes the owner or a hotel operator wants to make. (At the launch of Marina 101, it was said Hard Rock Hotel who was named as the hotel operator. But as with most details related to Marina 101, that was a long time ago…)

"I’ve been waiting since 2016, and it's been a long wait," said Johan James, an investor. "I’ve heard that for the hotel, they will completely redo that part. Once finished, it will probably be the best hotel of the area.

"I would like to thank RERA for their hard work in saving the project. Without their intervention, all the investors would have lost everything.”