Sunday, August 1, 2010

Job cuts continue in property sector
Sherwoods has become the latest company in Dubai’s real estate sector to cut staff on the impacts of the global financial crisis.
“We’ve entrenched by around 15 to 20 per cent across the company,” Vincent Easton, sales director at the property consultancy, told 7DAYS.
“We were strategising for a big increase in activity going through the latter part of last year and into this year.
“That strategy has had to change purely and simply because of the global credit crisis and the impact that’s had on the real estate market in Dubai,” he added.
Easton said that the firm’s sales had been down in the last quarter, although there was still interest in real estate purchasing in Dubai.
“I think the biggest challenge for us at the moment is our buyers have a wait-and-see policy. We seem to have a lot of people that are saying they will purchase, but they want to see where the ‘correct’ price is and at the moment that’s very difficult to see,” he said.
Easton also said that prospective clients had changed from speculators to home-buyers, and said the difficulty in securing a mortgage from banks was also a hindrance to  the firm’s sales.
However, he feels that Sherwoods is still in a strong position for this year.
“The days of order taking on off-plan properties are gone... Dubai’s going into a mature market now,” he said.
“That’s where we’re hoping that our recruitment strategy will start showing dividends, because our people are used to working in a mature market, where a buyer requires a certain level of service before they make a buying or renting decision.”