Damac Lagoons

Damac Lagoons is a set of Mediterranean villages around man-made lagoons, built by Damac beside its golf community on the Dubailand side of the city, and for most of its short life it has been an off-plan market more than a neighbourhood. That is changing: the first villages have handed over, the lagoons are filled, and the community is becoming a place people live in rather than a plan they bought into. This page is about both.

The place

The community lies across Hessa Street from Damac Hills, with Motor City and Dubai Sports City nearby and Tilal Al Ghaf and the desert beyond. It is laid out as a set of named villages, each themed on a Mediterranean place, around a network of lagoons with beaches, with a central district of shops, cafes and leisure at the water's edge. The villages are townhouses and villas on quiet streets, and the lagoons are meant to be swum in, paddled on and walked around.

The villages carry the names of Mediterranean places, Santorini, Costa Brava, Nice, Malta, Venice, Portofino, Marbella, Ibiza, Mykonos, Andalucia and Morocco among them, and each was launched and is handing over as a phase. The register records sales against those village names, and this page rolls them up to the community; the village pages carry each one's own record.

The earliest villages are lived in; the later ones are handing over or still being built, and the community's roads and centre are being finished around them.

What you get

Townhouses and villas only, in the developer's standard layouts, themed village by village in their facades and streetscapes and consistent inside. The townhouses are the volume and the entry point; the villas, on larger plots and nearer the water, are the top end. There are no apartments. Position within a village and the village's place around the lagoons decide price more than layout does: a house on the water and the same layout three streets back are different markets.

Getting around

By car. Hessa Street and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road connect the community to the city, with the Marina and the Media City offices a manageable commute outside the peak and Downtown and the airport longer. There is no Metro and no tram; buses reach the nearest stations. Inside the community the streets are quiet and the lagoons' promenades carry the walking.

Day to day

The central district at the water's edge is growing with the handovers, with a supermarket, cafes and the leisure facilities the developer promised; for now residents also use the shops, the school and the park of Damac Hills across the road, which are a short drive. Schools sit in Damac Hills, Motor City and Sports City, with nurseries in the villages. The lagoons and their beaches carry the weekends, and the Al Qudra cycle track is close.

The lagoons themselves are the community's promise: swimmable water, sand beaches, promenades, floating and water-sports facilities, and in the plan a district of cafes and restaurants along the shore. The earliest villages have theirs; the rest are following, and a buyer should ask which are open.

Who it suits

Families who want a new townhouse or villa with water at the end of the street, at prices below the established golf communities. Buyers comparing the newer villa communities on this side of the city, Tilal Al Ghaf, Arabian Ranches 3 and Mudon among them, who want the lagoon rather than the golf course. Investors, who have made the community one of the busiest off-plan markets in Dubai.

It suits people less well who want a finished community today, who need a school inside the gate, or who work in the centre or at the airport.

Buying and renting here

Two markets run at once and the register keeps them apart. The handed-over villages trade as ordinary resales of finished homes, and their record is growing village by village. The rest trades as off-plan resales, where a launch price for a village handing over in a few years is not what a finished house next door is worth today; the tables on this page show both, separately. The register files a house sold with its plot against the plot, and this page reads those sales correctly.

Buyers off-plan should know the handover date and the payment plan remaining; buyers of finished homes should walk the village at the hour they would live in it, because construction continues nearby. Service charges are set by the developer's community management. For the homes that are let, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market.

Villages to know

The first villages to hand over are the community's settled core and its resale record; the lagoon-front villages and the villa clusters are its top end; the villages still being built are its off-plan frontier. The table below shows where the community's sales are actually happening, and every village has its own page with every recorded price.