Damac Hills

Damac Hills is a golf community that grew into a suburb. Damac launched it under the name Akoya, wrapped villas, townhouses and apartment blocks around a championship course, and over a decade filled in the schools, the shops and the park that turn a development into a place to live. It sits on the Dubailand side of Hessa Street, between Motor City and the desert road out to Al Qudra, and should not be confused with Damac Hills Two, the developer's later and much more distant community, which the register treats as a separate place and which has a guide of its own.

The place

The community lies between Motor City and the desert road out to Al Qudra, with Dubai Sports City next door and Arabian Ranches and Mudon a short drive. The course is the centre, with its clubhouse and its fairways threading between the residential clusters. Around it the community is laid out in named villa and townhouse neighbourhoods on quiet internal loops, with the apartment blocks along the edges and the main entrances. The park is the other landmark: a long green with a lake, a skate park, playing fields, a fishing lake, a petting farm, a dog park and, at one end, a wave pool with a beach. It is one of the better parks in the city and it is inside the gate.

The Al Qudra cycle track begins nearby. Beyond the community's edge the land is still being built, and the roads around it have been reshaped more than once.

What you get

Three kinds of home. Apartments in the mid-rise blocks along the edges, from studios to family flats, several of them with fairway views. Townhouses in the named clusters, the community's core product, sold in a few standard layouts and finished to the developer's standard specification. And villas, from modest detached houses on internal streets to large golf-facing plots on the course itself, some of which their owners have rebuilt or extended.

The clusters have names rather than numbers, and the names carry information: buyers learn quickly which were built first, which face the course, which back onto the park and which sit along the entrance roads. The register records sales against those project names, and this page's tables roll them up to the community.

Getting around

This is a driving community. There is no Metro and no tram, and the nearest stations are on the Red Line along Sheikh Zayed Road, a long drive away. Hessa Street and Umm Suqeim Road connect the community to the city, Emirates Road runs behind it towards the second airport and the southern developments, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road is close. The Marina and the Media City offices are a manageable commute outside the peak; Downtown and the airport are longer.

Inside the gate the roads are quiet and the distances are real: the community is large, and a townhouse at the far end of a cluster is a drive, not a walk, from the park or the shops. Cycling is common and the internal roads suit it.

Day to day

The community has a school inside it and nurseries in the residential clusters, with more schools in Motor City and Sports City a short drive away. Shopping is in the retail strips along the apartment blocks, with a supermarket, pharmacies, cafes and the usual services, and the larger malls are a drive. The golf club's restaurants serve the whole community, not only members, and the clubhouse is where much of the community's social life happens.

The park carries the rest: weekend football, the skate park, the lake, the dog run and the wave pool in the warmer months. Sports courts sit alongside it. For a family with children this is the reason to be here rather than in a district closer to the centre.

Who it suits

Families who want a house with a garden, a school and a park inside the gate, at a price well below the older golf communities nearer the coast. Golfers, obviously. Tenants in the apartments who want green space and a pool without the cost of a villa. Investors in the apartment blocks, whose yields have been competitive because the flats are cheap relative to the houses around them.

It suits people less well who need public transport, who work in Downtown or the airport side of the city, or who want to walk to dinner. It is a suburb, and the trade it offers is space and quiet for distance.

Buying and renting here

Villa quality here varies by cluster and by when it was built, and the recorded prices reflect that: a golf-facing villa in an early cluster and a townhouse on an entrance road are different markets under one name. The tables on this page show what completed homes actually fetched, layout by layout, and every project has its own page with its full record. Buyers of villas should look at the plot as much as the house, because the register files a house sold with its land against the land, and the page reads those sales correctly.

Off-plan launches still happen at the community's edges and are kept separate on this page. Service charges vary between the clusters and the apartment blocks, and a golf view carries a premium in both. For tenants, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market, and the gap here has been wide in years when the community filled quickly.

The name

Akoya became Damac Hills some years after launch, and Akoya Oxygen, the developer's far larger community out along the road to Al Qudra, became Damac Hills Two. They are separate places with separate markets, a long drive apart, and the register keeps them apart. Anyone comparing prices across the two should be sure which one a figure describes.