International City

International City is the cheapest place to own a flat in Dubai, and it has been for most of two decades. Nakheel laid it out on the far side of the city beyond the creek, a vast grid of low-rise blocks in clusters named after countries, with Dragon Mart, the largest Chinese trading centre outside China, at its gate. It houses an enormous number of people at rents the rest of the city cannot approach, it trades more flats than almost anywhere else, and it is far less uniform than its reputation.

The place

The district lies along the Al Awir road on the eastern edge of the city, beyond Ras Al Khor and the wildlife sanctuary, with Warsan and Silicon Oasis as neighbours and Dragon Mart's two halls on its main road. The original clusters, each named for a country and each with a loose architectural nod to it, are low-rise blocks of a few floors around internal courtyards and car parks. The central district holds the taller buildings, and later phases have added newer and slightly larger blocks on the district's edges.

The clusters differ. Some are well run, with clean courtyards and working lifts; some are not, and the difference shows in what their flats fetch. The district's old troubles with maintenance and services have eased in parts and persist in others, and buyers here learn the clusters the way buyers elsewhere learn buildings.

What you get

Studios and one-bedroom flats above all, with two-bedrooms in the minority and little larger. The original clusters' flats are small and plainly built; the newer phases' are somewhat larger and better finished. There are no villas and no towers of note. What the district offers is a flat of your own at a price that competes with a year's rent elsewhere, and a tenant pool that never runs dry.

Getting around

By car, bus or taxi; there is no Metro, though a line has long been promised. The Al Awir road and the ring roads reach the airport and the older city in short runs, and Downtown and Business Bay in longer ones; the Marina is far. Buses serve the district heavily. Inside it, parking is the daily struggle: the original clusters were built with too little of it, and the streets fill.

Day to day

Dragon Mart is the district's high street, supermarket and department store at once, and its food halls feed a good part of it. The clusters carry small supermarkets, pharmacies, laundries and a great many restaurants serving the communities who live here. The district's own retail centres and the malls of Silicon Oasis and Mirdif are a short drive. Schools sit in the neighbouring districts, with several within a few minutes, and nurseries operate in the clusters.

The district is, to a degree no other in the city matches, owned by people who do not live in it. Investors from across the region and beyond bought its flats by the dozen when it launched and have traded them ever since, and the residents are tenants: traders at the halls, workers at the eastern free zones and the airport, families on tight budgets, and the district's own shopkeepers and restaurateurs. That is why it trades so much, and it is why a building's upkeep here depends on the strength of its owners' association more than on its age.

It is a working district, densely lived in, and its liveliness is its own.

Who it suits

Investors, above all: the district's yields have been among the highest in the city for years, its tenant demand is constant, and its flats change hands constantly. Owner-occupiers on tight budgets who would rather own than rent. Tenants who need a flat near the airport, the free zones of the east or the trading halls at a rent nothing else matches.

It suits people less well who want space, quiet, green or a short commute to the Marina end of the city, and anyone for whom the condition of the common areas matters more than the price.

Buying and renting here

The register is at its most useful here because the district trades so much: nearly every cluster and building has a deep record of completed sales, and the tables on this page and the building pages beneath it show what flats actually fetched, layout by layout, with the gap between the well-run clusters and the rest plain to see. Buyers should look at the owners' association, the service charge and the state of the building before the price. New phases launch off-plan and are kept apart from resales here.

Buyers should also know what they are buying into: a cluster's courtyard, car park and lifts are shared, the service charge that maintains them is set by the owners, and a block where the owners have stopped paying shows it within a year. The register's prices carry that information for anyone who reads them building by building.

For tenants, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market, and in a district this busy the two can differ. Landlords should know that turnover is high and that the well-run buildings let faster and for more.

Clusters and buildings to know

The country clusters are the district's original fabric and its cheapest homes; the central district's taller buildings and the newer phases at the edges are its better-finished end. The table below shows where the district's sales are actually happening, and every building has its own page with every recorded price.