Property owners, tenants in Dubai can now renew lease contracts online

Property owners and tenants in Dubai can now renew their lease and Ejari contracts online, without visiting service centres.

The Dubai Land Department (DLD) has added the lease self-registration service as part of its ‘The Development Initiative’ on its Ejari smart application, it announced on Monday.

The initiative targets all real estate tenants, allowing them to directly register and renew leases with the property owners whose Ejari system has expired, or if the owned property is not managed by a licenced real estate company, a statement said.

The service can be done without the need to visit the service centres approved by DLD.

Hamdan Al Madhani, director of Rental Relations Regulatory Department at DLD, said: “The new services in the Smart Ejari smart application enables landlords to register and renew lease contracts and digitally send contracts to tenants for approval and vice versa without the need to review a real estate service trustee concerned with the registration of Ejari contracts.”

The tenant will first have to register the lease contract data on the Ejari smart application. The owner/leasing entity then receives an SMS to review the data and to approve the application submitted by the tenant.

After completing these steps, the Ejari contract will be activated and can be used in all transactions with different institutions, government departments, or service providers to conclude transactions be it through electronic services or smart applications.

Sultan Butti bin Mejren, director general of DLD, said: “Adding new services to the Ejari smart application will help save customers’ time and efforts, and significantly reduce services fee. This will positively reflect on their happiness and will account for 30 per cent of customers’ daily transactions — reaching an average of 600 daily lease contracts.”

He added: “This step is important in the digital transformation pursued by DLD to fully align itself with the Smart Dubai vision and the Dubai Paperless Strategy, reducing customer visits by 80 per cent.”

The latest move comes amidst a slump in rental rates in the emirate.

The majority of agents in Dubai expect residential rents to decline by up to 5 per cent in the final quarter of the year, according to a new report.

The survey by property consultancy Cavendish Maxwell also found that rents dropped by an average of 1.3 per cent in Q3 and were most pronounced in Dubailand, The Greens in Emirates Living, Motor City, Arabian Ranches and Victory Heights – all down by 7 per cent year-on-year.

Read more: Dubai agents expect property prices, rents to decrease up to 5% in Q4

The emirate has endured a slump in real estate prices and rents over the last two-to-three years linked to increasing supply and limited demand.

Also read: Dubai property transactions down more than 20% in first nine months of 2018