Adie writes

I find the whole freeze in rentals a twisted exercise. RERA recently published a rental index …excluding the residential area stating they do not have enough data to print that index. Yet, the new ruling on the rent freeze has a twist that allows rent increase to level at or atleast be at 25% level lower of market prices based on a non-existent index. The press has further done a ironical job at presenting this as a freeze to publish some misleading good news for the tenants.

Great, so now the landlords will take a unilateral call on what the market price would be in each area as the area wise index is yet to be published. Furthermore, I find the whole logic of the Index by RERA senseless. They are basing their index on rental contracts being posted on their website.

How lazy can the agencies get? You don’t conduct any surveys in the various areas to arrive at a correct criterion of rentals to be charged. You do not assess a building’s age, the facilities provided against other apartments charging higher/lower rentals. Instead take the easy way out to just base your rental index on the average of the rentals being currently charged by a simple average calculation. Further this rental index ends up being based on already inflated rental prices of the past year when every area was charging exorbitant rentals in the first place. Now, with the new ruling, which is ENTIRELY in favour of the landlords, the rents of the existent rented properties would be spiked to match the 75% level at the most.

So it’s not a FREEZE…. it’s an UNFAIR and UNREALISTIC increase of the rental market. Because in some cases the rents would increase by even 50pct or more for landlords trying to match the inflated market rates in the area. As, the official index is still not available.

Way to go for a country that denies recession doesn’t see the people leaving, salary cuts, job losses, business losses all across instead hopes to further aggravate the situation on the rents.

What better way to beat recession but to protect one specific lobby of landlords by ensuring they can recover their inflated losses from the already suffering tenants in the city by skimming their last penny in the face of rising recession.

Dubai…. GET REAL.