Dubai Lagoon is a residential apartment community under construction in Dubai Investments Park. The development spans seven zones across a 5.7m sq ft site and consists of 54 mid-rise buildings encircling two man-made lagoons. After a troubled 16-year history, it remains incomplete.
The Dubai Lagoon project was launched by Schön Properties in the heady development days of 2005.
Apartments in the property were sold ‘off-plan’ before construction began. Almost immediately permission to build was withheld while the Dubai Roads and Transport Authority, who were planning the new metro and highways connecting the city to the Expo 2020 site and the new Maktoum Airport, sought to obtain part of the land on which Dubai Lagoon was to be built for road building.
Despite the resulting delay the developer continued to promise delivery of the buildings.
As Dubai’s building boom accelerated, the cost of materials increased and contractors were faced with mounting costs. Eventually it became cheaper for the contractor to default and accept penalties than to renegotiate with Schön Properties.
The developer himself was saddled with mounting debt as the global financial crisis started to bite and investors began to default.
In 2008 the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency (RERA) was inaugurated and began to address the investors’ complaints. The following year one disenchanted investor in Dubai Lagoon won a landmark case against the developer in the Dubai courts.
Time after time the developer insisted that the development would be completed, but the handover dates kept retreating, from 2007 as originally forecast to 2016.
In 2017 Schön Developments sold a chunk of the unfinished project to another developer, and the following year the Dubai Land Authority seized Schön’s property, plots of land and funds, leaving the shells of six apartment blocks as the only evidence of the 53-building project.
By 2021 the mothballed site of ‘one of the best master development communities in Dubai’ remains untouched, a testament to this sorry saga.
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