Dubai is proving to be increasingly popular among British property investors with figures from the land department showing they put £1.9 million into the emirate’s real estate market in 2015. This made them the second largest group of foreign investors behind Indians with UK investment almost doubling in three years.
R G Carter has been selected by the University of East Anglia to deliver its new £30m teaching building. The construction company recently began work on the four-storey building which will be open to students at its Norwich campus in September 2019. Paul Hamilton, Senior Project Manager at R G
SimScale, the world’s first provider of cloud-based engineering simulation solutions, has announced an upcoming webinar to teach HVAC system designers and mechanical engineers how to predict and improve thermal comfort, energy efficiency and performance of their designs. The webinar will be presented on March 27, 2018 at 5:00 PM CET
A former environmental consultancy from Preston has rebranded as 52M Consulting and relaunched to provide a range of stakeholder engagement services in support of ‘controversial’ yet critical infrastructure developments. Managing director, Lee Petts, said: “There were over 11,000 Town and Country planning appeals decided in England during 2016 and 2017.
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Dubai is proving to be increasingly popular among British property investors with figures from the land department showing they put £1.9 million into the emirate’s real estate market in 2015. This made them the second largest group of foreign investors behind Indians with UK investment almost doubling in three years. Apartments are the top buy for British buyers, followed by residential and commercial land and then villas with low interest rates, good rental yields and tax free returns on investments behind the rise in investment. According to Sultan Butti Bin Mejren, director general of the Dubai Land Department, the infrastructure in Dubai and the high return on investment makes property in the emirate attractive to buyers from overseas. British investors are looking for a good capital return on their investment, according to Sultan Al Suwaidi, a partner of Sumansa Exhibitions, the company running next month’s Dubai Property Show in London. ‘Dubai is a dynamic global investment hub and has always had attraction for international investors. The property market continues to mature and stabilise as a result of strategically implemented government regulations,’ he pointed out. ‘Returns for both small and large apartments in Dubai are delivering between 7% and 10% yield which is higher than Hong Kong, Singapore and London. Many British people investing in Dubai properties are seeking capital appreciation more than using them as primary or secondary homes,’ he explained. The areas where British investors are buying include Dubai Marina, Palm Jumeirah, Jumeirah Lake Towers and Downtown Dubai. According to figures from the property website Bayut affordable locations such as Dubai Sports City are also becoming more popular. Dubai’s zero taxation on rental income and capital gains is one of the biggest factors that appeal to British buyers and foreign investors in general are inclined to build their portfolios in Dubai to avoid the high taxes in their respective countries. It is also expected that the forthcoming Expo 2020 will boost Dubai’s real estate sector. Last year alone, Dubai attracted 12 million tourists and it is estimated that by 2020 the number of visitors will increase to 20 million, offering holiday rental opportunities for real estate investors. According to international real estate firm JLL, residential prices in Dubai increased by 56% in the last two years and rents by an average of 41% while data from Knight Frank shows that prices have recovered from the downturn and are now close to their peak levels of 2008. Yield returns reached 7.42% in Dubai’s mainstream market in July 2015. Property brokers in Dubai estimate that yields in the cheaper areas of the city such as Sports City are around 6% to 8%. Financing is usually arranged through local banks which will loan foreign buyers up to 50% of the purchase price depending upon their terms and conditions. The buying process is different to the UK. There are no conveyancing solicitors as the Dubai Land Department does the checks and it normally takes about a month to complete a sale with property being bought on a freehold basis. According to Aqil Kazim, chief commercial officer of Nakheel, the developer behind the world famous Palm Jumeirah and other leading developments across the emirate, British buyers are the firm’s third largest group of investors outside the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC). BOOKMARK THIS PAGE (What is this?) Source link
R G Carter has been selected by the University of East Anglia to deliver its new £30m teaching building. The construction company recently began work on the four-storey building which will be open to students at its Norwich campus in September 2019. Paul Hamilton, Senior Project Manager at R G Carter said: “We are delighted to be collaborating with the University of East Anglia on another great project. Working together, we are committed to delivering a brilliant new state-of-the-art building that will spur UEA staff and students ever closer to brilliant new discoveries.” The new development will provide a comprehensive range of lecture rooms and seminar rooms for students across all disciplines including science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. The top three floors will comprise teaching laboratories and the ground floor will house social and teaching space for more than 500 students. The building, currently named Building 60 until the official opening, is part of the university ’s 2030 vision which includes further investment on the campus. R G Carter completed the university ’s 500 room accommodation block, Barton and Hickling House, in 2017.
SimScale, the world’s first provider of cloud-based engineering simulation solutions, has announced an upcoming webinar to teach HVAC system designers and mechanical engineers how to predict and improve thermal comfort, energy efficiency and performance of their designs. The webinar will be presented on March 27, 2018 at 5:00 PM CET (11:00 AM ET). Diverse building codes and strict sustainability and energy efficiency requirements are driving the need for new innovative air conditioning strategies. Traditional design methods—such as hand calculations—involve many simplifications and assumptions, limiting the accuracy of the results. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, on the other hand, enable engineers to virtually analyze multiple HVAC system design configurations, visualizing the differences in flow velocity, density, and thermal impact, making it easier to accurately identify the best solutions. Nonetheless, until recently many engineering companies have been slow to adopt the technology, citing restrictions such as cost, unreliability, and inaccessibility. Although it can save weeks of design time and thousands of dollars in costs, engineering simulation has been expensive to use itself, requiring investments of over $40k in hardware and licenses of on-premises software. The emergence of easy-to-use cloud-based solutions have challenged the status-quo in recent years. Based in Germany, SimScale makes very complex simulations easily accessible via a standard web browser. With a free Community account, anyone in the world can set up and run multiple simulations, then post-process the results using a basic laptop or PC with an Internet connection. Today, more and more engineers are integrating cloud-based CFD into their design validation process which enables them to design comfortable environments at a reasonable cost. “We are moving forward from times when it was enough to calculate air volume in-out balance to ensure comfort in an office space,” said Dr. Pawel Sosnowski, Customer Success Engineer at SimScale. “With CAE tools provided by SimScale you can bring your ventilation design to the new era of engineering.” In this 30-minute webinar on March 27th, participants will learn how CFD simulation in the cloud can help air conditioning system designers ensure compliance with energy efficiency and thermal comfort standards, such as ASHRAE 90.2 and ASHRAE 55, and obtain a detailed overview of the air circulation within a building, essential for optimizing their designs. No prior simulation knowledge is required to participate, and SimScale provides free access to its CFD software via the Community account. Register here for this free webinar taking place on March 27th, at 11:00 AM ET / 5:00 PM CET. If you cannot participate in the live session, the organizers will be sending the recording to all registrants by email.
A former environmental consultancy from Preston has rebranded as 52M Consulting and relaunched to provide a range of stakeholder engagement services in support of ‘controversial’ yet critical infrastructure developments. Managing director, Lee Petts, said: “There were over 11,000 Town and Country planning appeals decided in England during 2016 and 2017. That’s a lot of development being rejected at a local level, and amounts to a huge amount of additional expense for the companies bringing forward those plans, not to mention the public purse. “Developers can avoid some of the risks of local authority refusal by better engaging with potentially affected stakeholders and improving community relations. This is particularly important in the case of contentious infrastructure. “We’re taking the skills and lessons learnt in our sustainability and corporate responsibility practice, and repurposing them to help get more critical infrastructure built for everybody’s benefit.” The company is no stranger to controversial developments. Since 2012, it’s worked closely with the fracking company Cuadrilla, and has previously worked with companies seeking to build recycling facilities and landfill extensions. 52M Consulting says it will focus on five key sectors in which developments are often labelled as controversial. These include large-scale renewables, new road and rail, onshore oil and gas, housing and waste. In a recent online poll of over 1,200 respondents, it found that waste sites and oil and gas extraction sites jointly proved to be the least popular forms of development nationally, followed by new housing, road and rail, and, lastly, wind and solar farms. John Kersey, Non-Executive Chairman and a former Fairness Commissioner for Lancashire County Council, added: “People living in communities that are being asked to host new infrastructure want to feel as if they have a genuine say. It’s only fair. But, sometimes, even if it’s not something they want on their doorstep, it will still have to proceed because there’s a pressing need. “If we’re to meet our climate change commitments, for instance, we need to build-out more large-scale renewables developments. If we want to boost energy security by weaning ourselves off imported gas, we need to develop our shale gas resources. And if we want to avoid landfill for our waste, we need greater recycling and waste-to-energy capacity. We have to put this infrastructure somewhere. In part, our job is to help build acceptance by helping otherwise reluctant communities to see things differently and by involving them more.”
