The eighth annual Cityscape Dubai starts tomorrow.

Organisers say it is the “world’s largest real estate investment show” and that they are aiming to attract 80,000 people – 10,000 more than last year. Who knows if that’s going to happen, especially in these tougher financial times?

In the meantime, here’s a selection of our Cityscape Dubai 2009 coverage.

Interview: Rohan Marwaha, managing director of Cityscape

Comment: Cityscape 2009 - a reality check

Comment: The most important Cityscape yet?

Comment: Rohan Marwaha on Cityscape Dubai 2009

News: No Cityscape discounts offered to Emaar, Nakheel - organiser

News: Nakheel u-turn on Cityscape Dubai plans

News: Limitless not to attend this year

If you have any Cityscape news let us know.

At the time of writing, shares in Emaar Properties are down 10 percent in the first five hours of trading since it announced it would be acquiring Dubai Holdings companies Sama Dubai, Tatweer and Dubai Properties Group.

Investors are trying to absorb the complexity of the deal and, in the absence of hard facts about the future of the business, they are taking the obvious course of action: clear out of the stock until reliable information emerges.

Sama, Tatweer and DPG are private companies without published accounts. In essence, all three are holding companies - subsidiaries of the daddy of all holding companies: Dubai Holdings.

As such, they are the sum of their assets, rather than assets in their own right. To illustrate the intangible role of these companies, you only have to read their mission statements. For example, on Tatweer’s web site, it has a frequently asked question section that provides the following insight:

Question: What is Tatweer’s main strategy?

Answer: Tatweer will focus on leadership development to achieve business excellence and world class quality standards for all of its subsidiaries.

Tatweer will become a world class enterprise through value generation, customer focus and excellence for our people and stakeholders. In addition, it will focus on developing and diversifying the business portfolio by capitalising on market opportunities in existing and new sectors.

If anybody can find a statement with less meaning than this, please send it on a postcard to Arabian Business.

The assets under management by these holding companies are considerably more meaningful, but no easier to value.

Emaar has said that the combined companies will have assets worth a total of $52.85 billion. Not $52 billion, not $53 billion, exactly $52.85 billion - precision that suggests real mathematics and accounting is involved.

In its current trading statement, Emaar says that its assets are valued at $16.5 billion. The combined total for Sama, Tatweer and Dubai Properties is therefore $36.35 billion.

The value of Sama, Tatweer and Dubai Properties assets are therefore priced at more than double the value of Emaar’s assets.

Judge for yourself whether that calculation seems reasonable, by comparing the value of these assets:

The first thing that strikes me when comparing these lists of projects is that Emaar is considerably more diversified in terms of its geographic spread. Between Sama, Dubai Properties and Tatweer, only three projects are outside the UAE. For Emaar, the majority are non-UAE.

Real estate values are falling all around the world, but nowhere faster than the UAE. Emaar’s asset value should therefore be more robust than those of its new businesses.

The real question for investors is how to value these assets, what are the business plans of each project (cashflow, revenues, profits), and what will be their impact on the overall profitability and growth prospects of the group.

This would require a full time team of forensic accountants and researchers several years to evaluate.

Which makes it all the more surprising that a value of $52.85 billion has been established only moments after the news was released that these companies would be merging. I’m not saying that it isn’t $52.85 billion, but I expect I could make a case for $52 billion or $53 billion just as easily.

You do the maths, and let me know what you conclude.

If you want to know which direction the GCC economy is heading, always check the oil price.

The global economy is more interconnected than ever, and so is the GCC economy. And no other sector of the global and local economy is a more reliable indicator of future trends than the oil price.

Statisticians could play all day with different numbers, and they would struggle to find an example that disproves the theory that when the oil price is strong, the GCC economy is strong. When the oil price is weak, so is the rest of the GCC economy.

Being a journalist, I could only be bothered to compare three variables: Brent Crude oil price, the GCC All Share Index and Dubai land sales.

The graph above begins in May, 2008, which was the peak month for Dubai land sales (which is affected by volume and the price of the land (I have calculated May 2009 by multiplying the first 10 days by three)). It was also just about the peak of the GCC All Share Index, and two months before the peak oil price in July.

The relationship between the oil price and GCC shares is almost perfect. Dubai land sales have underperformed - not surprising when you consider the massive bubble that was created in the run up to summer last year.

So, which way now for the GCC economy? Well I’m no expert in commodity trading, but I know an organisation that is. PMV Oil Associates predicts that oil will approach $63 dollars per barrel in the coming weeks and will rally to $78 within the next six months. (http://www.arabianbusiness.com/555058-crude-oil-price-to-hit-78-within-6-months).

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For a moment there I thought we’d defy gravity forever. Spectacular wealth was not just for a privileged few, it was there for me and all my mates.

We didn’t need to be white-haired business geniuses who have spent a lifetime building successful companies to be earn the big bucks, we just needed to hop jobs a few times like Premiership footballers, picking up an inflated pay deal with every move. Loyalty was for losers.

We didn’t have to wait for the kids to leave home before buying a $100,000 sports car, we could support a family and an expensive motoring habit on credit.

People who lived in the houses they had bought were mugs. We just owned houses on paper - much easier to carry in your wallet and sell on to the next genius investor you bumped into in the bar. God forbid we ever had to live in one of the concrete identikit compounds of villas, if they ever got built.

Our parents worked their entire lives and ended up owning only one house - JUST ONE! OK, the mortgage was paid off and they’d saved enough for a comfortable retirement, but who needs security. Money is wasted on the old. We were much better off blowing the lot as we went because there’d be even more coming our way next year.

And as for the lifestyle, what was wrong with eating in five-star hotels every night, flying business class for my three foreign holidays every year and doing my weekly shopping in Harvey Nichols?

The oil-soaked, tax-free GCC gave globetrotting expatriates like me the opportunity to reach my full potential in a couple of years. I’d have been mad to stay in my home country and take a decade to build a decent career and lifestyle.

And who wanted to pay for big government when I could afford to pay for the best of everything: schools, hospitals, private security, drivers, maids and gardeners.

That was before the so-called “correction”.

Now I’m terrified about losing my job. I thought I was bulletproof, but I haven’t sold a Securiflex 3000 in three months and I’m not sure the prospects are any better this month.

Not that my mind is entirely on the job. I’m more concerned about finding buyers for the properties I own that I’ve heard will be delayed until 2012. I haven’t had a sniff of a buyer, even though I’ll dump them now for the price of a plane ticket.

This place has screwed me over. The property developers were all over me when I was flashing the cash around. Now they won’t even answer the phones. My mates haven’t been so easy to get hold of either recently.

As for the locals, they strut around like they own the place.

When the banks collapsed in Iceland, the government told the population to go back to fishing. I don’t know what to go back to because I was never much good at school and didn’t learn a proper trade.

I should stop speaking like this. If the bank gets wind of my predicament, they’ll call in all my loans. I’ve heard people are being arrested if they default, so they’re stuck in some sort of purgatory where they can’t leave the country until their debts are paid, but they’ve got no job, no visa, no way of renting a place. They’re sleeping on people’s sofas wearing Armani pyjamas, fearing every knock on the door.

I’m bailing out while I still can. After all I’ve done for this place, they’ve left me with nothing. So sod the lot of you, I’ve heard Kazakhstan’s the next big thing and I’m going to make my fortune there.

Guest author: Philip (the flipper) Holmes. Rob Corder returns next week.

This website has unearthed new rental data from RERA that looks certain to form the basis of the next Dubai Rental Index.

A new service on the the Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Authority’s web site allows landlords and tenants to enter details of their type of accommodation, current rent, and the name of their residential district. The web site then gives a guide price for how much rent should be paid.

However, the RERA web site stops short of publishing a full table of rents, so Arabianbusiness.com has put in the leg work to produce what is, in effect, the April 2009 Rental Index.

Having created the table, we then looked at the change in rents for every applicable area since the Index was last published in January 2009.

For villas, we compared median prices for three-bedroom homes; for apartments we compared median prices for two-bedroom units.

The results are startling. In the four months since the Rental Index was last published, rents have plummeted by almost 50 percent in some parts of the city.

Freehold developments have been worst affected, with two-bedroom apartment rents for Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai Investment Park and Dubai Silicon Oasis all registering price drops of well over 40 percent.

Villa rental drops in the freehold areas have also been battered. Rents for a three bedroom villa in The Springs fell by 45 percent. Green Community, The Meadows and Arabian Ranches have all seen rents fall by one-third.

Table 1: Rental Index for Apartments (AED,000 per annum). Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a two-bedroom apartment.

Table 2: Rental Index for Villas (AED,000 per annum). Residential Areas are ranked according to the price change for a three-bedroom villa.