So I was thinking that I haven’t really had a post where I am adding value. So I am going to try to state the obvious and make a post about what I think is going to be up in 2014 for Dubai (Or UAE in general).

1) Rents Go UP UP UP: The Expo 2020 has kick started the same vicious loop of 2008. The landlords have just got the opportunity to increase the rent by 20-30% citing the huge increase in demand due to Expo 2020. Its all Bull Shit. It will go up further next year as construction starts and the construction hiring really kicks in.

2) More People Will Move Away From Dubai: People living in Dubai will go Sharjah, People living in Sharjah will go to deeper Sharjah, People living in deeper Sharjah will go to Ajman. Everyone is going to trade down just to keep the rents in check and survive through this bubble.

3) More Highway Traffic: All inter-Emirates road should see even higher rush as a lot of people have moved away from Dubai but still work there. Say Hello to Early Mornings and Shitty ‘Stuck-in-the-Traffic’ Evenings. Its just going to get worse from here.

4) Government Fees will go Up: All this constructions need to be funded from somewhere. They are going to try to source it from internal revenue. The government fees have already increased a lot year on year. Now, its just going to go BOOM. Anything & Everything is going to cost you.

5) More Radars, More Fines : Going along the point 4, RTA being the biggest revenue generator will try to maximize income by placing more radars and asking cops to be more strict with their fines.

6) Higher Cost of Living: With rents and other operating expenses going up companies will increase their margins to cope with the pressure which will lead to further increase of overall cost of living. Say Bye Bye to savings.

7) Self Serve Petrol Stations: They’ve been trying to introduce this since forever. I strongly feel they’ll try to roll out phase by phase this year.

8) More & Better E-commerce: Increase in operating costs for offline retailers will prompt the online competition to be even more aggressive. More and more companies will identify opportunities in the online space and startup.

9) Telecom will get cheaper: With the Number Portability kicking in both Du and Etisalat will try its best to acquire as many customers as possible from each other as possible which will initiate a price/value war for various packages. This will be interesting.

I really tried making the post look good with having the conventional 10 points. But 2014 is time to break the norms and I am going to go ahead and end it with the odd 9 points. Do drop in comments if you have some more predictions