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Capital municipality warns illegal property managers

The Municipality of Abu Dhabi City on Wednesday warned unauthorised individuals and companies against dealing in property management.

The move to warn unauthorised property dealers came following the municipality’s commissioning of a new mechanism for streamlining the property management in collaboration with the Department of Economic Development to bring it at par with the Tawtheeq Tenancy Contracts System.

“The property management activity must only be practised by a body licensed to do so. Companies licensed in other emirates are not entitled to practice the property management activity in Abu Dhabi unless after obtaining a commercial permit from the Department of Economic Development. Equally, individual investors shall not be allowed to practise property management activity unless they have a business relationship or kinship with the property owner,” the municipal department said in a statement.

The move is also aimed at curbing the illegal practice of sub-letting and illegally leasing properties by unlicensed individuals and groups. In the city and Mussafah, these people look for old buildings and take them on annual contracts directly from owners and rent the apartments to people desperately looking for accommodation. They charge tenants from Dh2,000 to Dh5,000 per room per month, making three to four fold profit.

They also partition sitting rooms to make more money. These illegal brokers advertise their illegally secured properties for free all over the city using lampposts and building walls. Some of them are seen distributing their business cards offering apartments, rooms and bed spaces.

Most of their victims are low-income families and bachelors who cannot afford to have their own apartments. All these agents make their living on this illegal practice and make good money — some from Dh50,000 to Dh100,000 a month.

“We live in a single bedroom apartment we got through an Asian agent who has taken almost half of the five-storey building. I’m sharing a small room with five others, and in total we all pay Dh3,000 per month that includes water and electricity tariff,” Shehzad Ali, a Pakistani resident of Freej Al Sayegh on Hamdan Street.

He also said the sitting room is also rented out to another group of eight bachelors for Dh5,000 per month.

Another low income bachelor, A.A. Hameed, from India, said: “We are four of us in our room in this three bedroom apartment. We got this room from a Bangladeshi broker for Dh2,500 a month. It is a small room, but good to have it as we struggled a lot to find it.”

He also said in addition to rents they have to pay the watchman Dh100 every month so their room is secured when the apartments are inspected to ensure not more than three people occupy a single room.

Commenting on the new mechanism aimed at cleaning the city of these illegal practices, Ali Khalid Al Hashimi, Head of Tawtheeq Tenancy Contracts, said: “This procedure aims to curb the outlawed subleasing and the manipulation of the rights of the property management by a number of unlicensed beneficiaries and brokers.”

The Tawtheeq system since its launch contributed to streamlining the real estate market and safeguarding the rights of the contracted parties (lessors and tenants), besides providing a huge database that constitutes a reference spatial data that can be utilised in uplifting the business process of trading in real estate across Abu Dhabi Emirate.

news@khaleejtimes.com

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