Schon plans hotel complex opening for Dubai Investments Park

This week, Schon Properties—the developer behind the stalled Dubai Lagoon project in Dubai Investments Park—announced plans for a Dh3.2 billion project that should add 2,550 hotel rooms to Dubai Investment Park.

The company has reportedly awarded a construction contract to Dubai Civil Engineering to build the development and work on the project started in October. The first deliveries are expected by summer 2019 and the full project would be completed by summer 2020.

That deadline is no coincidence, of course: Dubai is famously looking to bring in 20 million visitors by the time of the 2020 Expo, in spite of declining occupancy and revenue numbers throughout the Emirate. Schon said the 2.6-million-square-foot iSuites complex of 21 nine-story buildings (comprising the hotel apartments) as well as 52 restaurant and cafes and a 125,000-square-foot shopping mall will be delivered in time for Dubai’s Expo in 2020.

More than 2,500 people signed up to invest in Schon’s flagship Dubai Lagoon project in 2005, which was (at the time) slated for completion for three years down the line. But nine years later, little progress had been made on the construction and investors wanted their money back. In 2014, the Dubai Land Department announced that the scheme would be broken into seven phases and monitored by Rera until completion.

Under the new agreement, two of the seven phases were redesigned as hotel apartments and are being marketed as the iSuites. The project was slated for completion by 2016 at the time, but is still unoccupied. 

Schon said it expected the first residents to move in during the first quarter of 2017 and that 200 units were complete and waiting to be connected to electricity and water. It said that the entire master community would now be completed in 2019 or 2020.

"Experience has taught us to put our focus on what is the most important thing to our customers – that is delivering to customers on time and at the right price," Noorul Asif, Schon COO, told the National. "We are confident that with the team we have in place, iSuites will deliver on time."