Bye bye, you don’t work with us anymore

Bye bye, you don’t work with us anymore

While lay-offs in the region have begun in the property sector, international statistics show that it could soon spread across the board.

November 12, 2008 10:53 by kippreport

Most of the real estate sector employees will be happy to go to work every morning. With the sector reflecting the global economic slowdown, lay offs are fast becoming a reality. Damac Holding, which claims to be Dubai’s largest private property developer, started the trend by cutting 200 jobs, or 2.5 percent of its workforce, on Tuesday.

Damac Properties said in a statement that the job cuts would come in its sales, marketing and recruitment departments. “As an international developer, we cannot expect to be unaffected by the downturn in countries like the UK,” the company’s CEO Peter Riddoch said.

The next developer in line is Omniyat Properties, which, according to The National, could be laying off about 60 people. Alex Andarakis, the company’s managing director of sales and marketing, told the paper that jobs will be lost due to a reassessment of the company’s needs.
“We have a number of projects in the pipeline, which will be brought to the market when conditions can cope with them. Considering this, there are likely to be some redundancies, given the fact that we are not yet launching projects which are still under development,” he said.

But Dubai is not isolated in its job-cuts.
Over 4,000 jobs were slashed on Tuesday in Britain, reports The Times, with figures on Wednesday expected to show the highest number of people out of work since 1998. Most of the cuts were in the media, pharmaceutical and technology sectors, with Virgin Media laying off 2,200 of its employees.
The paper claims that the average daily job losses in Britain is approaching 1,000.

While the merciless job-slashing is mainly confined to the real estate sector in the Gulf (Standard Chartered is rumored to have cut 80 jobs in the UAE), it is bound to reach other sectors soon— the construction, advertising and media industries for instance, which are highly dependent on the property market.

And while we’re predicting the end of the world, we just wanted to add this interesting bit of news which we came across recently: even as Damac is bade a farewell to its employees, it advertised that it was having a special promotion on November 8th.it gave Nokia E71 mobile phones to the first 100 pre-registered customers who bought property.