DOHA: Housing prices in Qatar are expected to rise again from late 2009 and growth in the property market to continue due to infrastructure needs in the world's biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, executives said yesterday.
"We will see stability very soon, by the third quarter, and the market will start climbing again," Brian Meilleur, president of Al Waab City, a $3.3bn mixed-use property project, said on the sidelines of a construction conference here. "Once we get this one done, we would like to look further into Qatar and look regionally as well."
House prices have fallen as much as 30 percent in the last six months due to the global slowdown, but high demand for property will limit price weakness, real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle said in May.
The economy could grow seven percent or more in real terms in 2009, the Minister of Economy and Finance, H E Yousuf Hussein Kamal, has said.
At the end of March, around 191 construction projects were under way in Qatar, with a total value of $82.5bn, Dubai-based research firm Proleads said in April.
© The Peninsula 2009
