You can build it, but will they come?

ENAR

Amid plots of unsold, multi-million dollar reclaimed land, on what was 30 years ago an uncontrolled garbage mountain rising from the sea, Downtown Beirut now features more completed buildings than cranes. However, the Beirut Central District (BCD) has been hit hard by stagnation in the real estate market that began in 2011. While projects launched at the beginning of the decade have been delivered or are nearing completion, sales ratios mean investors have still not realized gains. Solidere, the company created by Parliament in 1991 and founded in 1994 to oversee rebuilding of the BCD, in the past handily published project updates throughout Downtown in its annual report, but the company’s most recently published review of yearly performance on its website is from 2014. Interviews and desk research, however, confirm that three residential towers on the western flank of the BCD were delivered in 2017: Beirut Terraces, the DAMAC Tower,