Qatari real estate company Barwa Group has unveiled Dara, the Gulf state’s first residential project open to foreign ownership, Barwa CEO told Arabian Business.
 
“This is the first project built for sale. Generally we developed projects only to lease” Abdulla Abdulaziz Al Subaie, Barwa Group CEO, toldArabian Business.
 
“We will not apply quota [for foreign ownership], but based on the demand we will do a pre-registration to select the requests” Al Subaie added.
 
“We noticed that people are less interested in living in high rise buildings due to many issues [such] as density of people, elevators issues, few balconies,” he added. “What we offer here is four to five floor buildings with 30-40 apartments each. You feel safer and you know the people in the community.”
 
Al Subaie said the company had already received thousands of calls from interested buyers. He claimed around 40 percent of the enquiries were coming from foreigners. Previously foreign buyers could only buy on the Pearl Qatar development.

The new Dara project will make up a fifth of the QR7 billion ($1.922bn) Fox Hills development at Lusail, and it will consist of six buildings with 162 apartments, with each apartment having its own balcony and a parking spot.
 
Barwa is currently the largest publicly listed real estate company in Qatar in terms of real estate developments and the group recorded a total asset value of approximately QR50.2bn ($13.78bn) at the end of 2012.
 
Source: http://www.arabianbusiness.com/qatar-s-barwa-launches-first-project-for-foreign-buyers-503393.html