Organisers of this year’s Cityscape Global are hoping to capitalise on the international audience attracted to Expo 2020 Dubai as the annual event is moved from its traditional setting to the heart of the global showpiece.
Cityscape Global’s 20th edition, which is set to run from November 9-11 this year, will not take place at Dubai World Trade Centre, but instead at the brand new Dubai Exhibition Centre (DEC) and will run alongside the Expo 2020 Dubai, which is set to throw its doors open to the world on October 1.
Chris Speller, group director of Cityscape, Informa Markets, told Arabian Business: “We’ve got a real opportunity to reach out to an international audience, a new audience. For a very large percentage of countries participating at the Expo, real estate is one of the revenue streams for their own country’s GDP.
“We’re working with as many of those pavilions as we can to bring them in so when visitors come they can visit the Expo – I’ve had very brief glimpses of it and it’s going to be spectacular – we’re hoping to get some of that audience excited about the real estate side and feed into the exhibition itself.”
A property glut and faltering demand in Dubai have driven prices down by more than a third since the market peaked some seven years ago. The decline has been made worse by the coronavirus pandemic.
Chris Speller, group director of Cityscape, Informa Markets.
Leading Dubai developer Damac has long called for a halt on new projects, while building giant Emaar announced last year that it was temporarily stopping new project launches.
Speller said that, while in the age of coronavirus grand announcements traditionally associated with Cityscape Global may be few and far between, there is much to be excited about this year’s event.
He said: “What we have seen is the ability to launch new projects isn’t around at the moment. That’s not the focus. The focus for us is to still offer value back to the real estate market.
“The physical show is going to be more about the brands and allowing you to set up meetings. You’ll see the show will be less around massive models, less around the big fanfare but more about, these are projects that are being delivered, this is what is was, this is what it’s going to be.”
For the first year ever the event will be holding virtual investor intelligence summits, online seminars and digital networking in the months before and after Cityscape Global, with the online and in-person combining to what Speller hopes will see around 40,000 people taking part – around the level witnessed around 2016-17.
He said: “As laboured and as fed up as we are with talking about Covid, it’s the same with the word hybrid and what hybrid actually means. It’s another one of those terminologies which people are becoming exhausted by.
“However, if you take hybrid into the actual format of what it means, it just means that historically people used to buy into Cityscape and expect to get their return of their investment from the four day, that was the only opportunity and that was our only solution, our USP.
“What we’re doing as hybrid is how do we extend that. How do we make four days suddenly become four months. Our marketing campaigns for something like Cityscape Global historically normally starts seven or eight weeks outside of the show. We started at the beginning of February.
“Now what we’re doing is bringing all of the investors and trying to build up different types of communities and then we’re allowing the developers to start engaging with them now.”
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