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Since the early 1990s, I have hired hundreds of fresh-faced journalists wanting to make the leap from London to Dubai.
The promise of year-round sunshine and tax-free living in an exotic part of the world has been a lure for media graduates for 20 years, and they eagerly sell their skills in an attempt to land a job.
But there is one hurdle that trips up every job interview; one moment when their enthusiasm dips, their game face slips.
It is the moment when I explain that landlords in the UAE could demand an entire year’s rent in advance.
Fear not, I reassure them, the banks are well set up to help you settle in. A salary certificate from a reputable employer such as ITP will have them tripping over themselves to set you up with a car loan, a housing loan, an overdraft and a credit card.
The only problem, I continue, is resisting the temptation to go crazy with borrowing and run up crippling debts.
But I give this advice out of necessity, not choice. It feels wrong to suggest graduates earning perhaps 12,000 dirhams should be forced into taking out a housing loan of 80,000 dirhams just to get a roof over their heads. Surely, the landlords should be more flexible.
Economic conditions today should signal a long-needed shift in power. Property nearing completion at the moment is likely to come onto the market as rentable housing, because there are very few people willing to buy in the current climate.
This will lead to a considerable spike in the availability of villas and, particularly, apartments to rent. This alone will put downward pressure on what are currently obscenely high prices.
And with banks tightening their lending criteria for people looking to borrow money to pay a full year’s rent in advance, there will be fewer tenants able to find the funds to write those cheques.
The solution should be for landlords to accept market practices that are normal in the entire developed world: annual tenancy agreements, but rent paid monthly.
It is hard to think of an argument against this course of events. Landlords look certain to be stuck spending money on empty properties if they don’t offer competitive prices and flexible terms as economic conditions worsen.
The market will not reach this point immediately. I think it will take a few months for conditions to reach what I see as an inevitable state, probably early in the new year.
2009 will witness a profound shift in power away from landlords and towards tenants; a shift that is long overdue.