Mini-me builders make millions from models

BUSINESS MODEL: Modelcraft CEO Matthew Roche.

While global real estate markets go into meltdown, one part of the industry has shrugged off the credit crunch and is booming like never before.

Architectural model-makers are making as much as one million dirhams ($272,000) per job for producing scale models of the some of the region’s mega-projects – whether they ever get built or not.

Modelcraft, a Dubai-based company with offices in Sydney and Melbourne earns up to one million dirhams on the models it produces for real estate clients that can take up to three months to produce.

It designed the original Burj Dubai model and Nakheel’s Trump Tower model that recently was recently displayed in New York.

The firm has been so busy with orders in the run-up to Dubai’s annual Cityscape real estate exhibition that it was even too busy to tender for the developer’s kilometre tall tower that was launched on Sunday.

“We have been feeling the impact of the slowdown in our Australian offices but not here,” said CEO Matthew Roche, who founded the company in 1990.

The company now employs more than 50 model-makers from a variety of backgrounds that include architects and tool-makers and some people who have made their hobbies their work.

The annual Cityscape conference has become one of the biggest pay days of the year for architectural model companies as developers compete for attention by displaying larger models every year.

“The quality of the models seems to be becoming less important than the size of the models,” said Roche.

Rival model-makers are also benefiting from the surge in real estate development across the Gulf.

“Business is booming,” said Michael Dziewiatowski, marketing manager at Dubai model-making outfit Micro.

He left his old sales job in Glasgow 18 months ago and started to work for the modeling company which counts the Beijing Olympics Bird’s Nest Stadium among its credits.

The company has also produced models for Emaar Properties, Mizin, Nakheel and Sama Dubai.

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