Town Square

Town Square was built to be the answer to a question the city had stopped asking: could a young family afford a townhouse with a park at the end of the street? Nshama laid it out along Al Qudra Road on the desert side of the city, a set of townhouse neighbourhoods and apartment blocks around one very large park, and priced it for first-time buyers. The park is as good as promised, the community filled quickly, and the trade it asks of its residents is the drive.

The place

The community sits on Al Qudra Road beyond Arabian Ranches and Mudon, with Remraam and the desert on its far side. The park is its centre, a long green with lawns, playgrounds, a splash pad, a skate park, a cycling and running track, an outdoor cinema and a strip of cafes and shops along its edge. The townhouse neighbourhoods surround it in named clusters, each with its own pools and small parks, and the apartment blocks line the community's main roads and the park's edge. A hotel sits on the square.

It was built in phases from the park outward, and the phases show in the trees: the earliest clusters around the park are green and settled, the newer ones at the edges are still growing in, and the community's boundary has moved outward more than once as new clusters launched. Remraam, the older and cheaper community beside it, and Mudon and the Ranches on the city side are its neighbours and its comparisons.

It is a young place in every sense: new, full of small children, and still growing at its edges.

What you get

Townhouses in the developer's standard layouts, in named clusters that differ mainly in age and position; and apartments in the mid-rise blocks, from studios to family flats, several of them facing the park. The finish is consistent and modest. There are no large villas; the community was built for the middle of the market and has stayed there.

Position within the community matters more than the layout: a townhouse on a cluster's internal street and one on the main road, a flat over the park and one over the car park, trade differently.

Getting around

By car, and the drive is the whole trade. Al Qudra Road reaches Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Road and the city in a run that is reasonable outside the peak and long inside it; the Marina and the Media City offices are a commute, Downtown and the airport longer. There is no Metro and no tram, and the community's buses reach the nearest station. Inside the community the streets are quiet, the track around the park is busy, and children cycle everywhere.

Day to day

The park and its strip carry most of it: a supermarket, pharmacies, cafes, restaurants, a gym, the cinema and the weekend markets and events the community runs. The larger malls are a drive. There are nurseries inside the community and schools have opened in and around it, with more in Arabian Ranches and Mudon a short drive away. The community's sociability is its strength: it is full of families at the same stage of life, and they use the park.

Who it suits

First-time buyers and young families who want a house with a garden and a park, and who will accept the commute for the price. Tenants priced out of the older villa communities who want new stock. Investors in the apartment blocks, whose yields have been competitive against the older districts.

The community's residents are, to an unusual degree, at the same stage of life: young families with small children, many in their first house, many of them from the same handful of countries. That gives it a sociability the older suburbs have lost, and it gives the park and the strip an audience every evening of the week.

It suits people less well who work in the centre or at the airport, who need public transport, or who want an established neighbourhood with mature trees and a school of long standing inside the gate.

Buying and renting here

The community's uniform stock gives the register a clean record: thousands of similar townhouses and flats, sold and resold, and the tables on this page show what each layout has actually fetched. Off-plan launches continue at the edges and are kept apart from resales here. The register files a townhouse sold with its plot against the plot, and this page reads those sales correctly. Service charges are set by the developer's community management and are modest.

The two halves of the market here behave differently. The townhouses are bought to live in and change hands as families grow; the apartments are bought to let, and their yields have been the community's investment case. A buyer of either should read the project's page for what its layouts actually fetched, because the asking prices here move with launches more than with the register.

For tenants, the official index caps a renewal while a new lease follows the market, and the community's rents have moved as the city's families have discovered it.

Neighbourhoods to know

The townhouse clusters around the park are the community's core and its earliest homes; the apartment blocks along the park's edge and the main roads are its volume. The table below shows where the community's sales are actually happening, and every project has its own page with every recorded price.