With many property companies in the Middle East doing exceptionally well and many wealth funds as a resort starting to expand their financial influence around the world, the demand for Middle East property is already high. However, recent events within the Gulf Coast have seemed to indicate that the demand could get a lot higher in a short amount of time.
Islamic banks and insurance agencies are the types of companies that look to investment on a regular basis. In the case of the former it is to invest money safely for their customers and in the case of the latter it is to gain returns on insurance payments in order to help offset the costs of paying out insurance benefits.
However, both of these types of companies are not able to make investments into anything speculative or anything that pays out in interest for the simple reason that their religious rules prohibit them from doing that. This means that in the short term their choices for safe investment paths are very small and in the long term their choices are even smaller. When one considers that most insurance companies look for 30-year deals for their life insurance payments, this makes the situation for many companies very difficult indeed.
However, many of these same companies have started turning to property as being the safest non-secured investment that can be made and indeed as the success of these investments is being realised, more and more banks and insurance companies in the Islamic world are starting to turn to property in order to make profit rather than interest from their investments.
Real estate investment, according to the insurance companies in the Middle East, is the closest replication of long-term bond profits that they can get and therefore one can expect that more companies will be following suit now that the benefits of investment in real estate have been demonstrated.
The bottom line: expect demand in the Middle East property market to grow greatly as more of these companies enter the market.
