DOHA (Reuters) – Qatar has found itself with an unexpected glut of rooms in the packed World Cup group stage, with online portals listing rooms at at least 42 hotels and Airbnb offering hundreds of weekend options.
This is a far cry from warnings by Qatari officials before the tournament, including the CEO of Qatar Airways, and fan groups such as Football Supporters Europe of a shortage, prompting organizers to arrange additional accommodation in villas, apartments, cruise ships, temporary cabins and even desert camps.
Doha landlords expected a boom of 1.2 million visitors, with numbers expected to peak on November 24-28, but the surplus has caused rents to drop and will have spillover effects on the broader property market, some real estate agents said.
Two real estate agents, two housing companies and tenants say some landlords in the small Gulf state had sought unrealistically high rents in the run-up to the event, which left thousands of rooms vacant.
Many fans have opted to stay out of Doha and fly to matches, using up to 500 daily shuttle flights from nearby cities such as tourism hub Dubai that the Qatar Airways chief said were put in place partly in response to what he called a “lack of accommodation”.
“We were in contact with half the city, all the big real estate companies…they weren’t interested,” said a residency broker who has worked at several global sporting events and asked not to be named due to commercial sensitivities.
The realtor cited the example of a two-bedroom Doha apartment that was listed at $1,200 per night in early October. A week before the World Cup kicks off on November 20, the broker said, the price was $250 a night.
Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, the organizers of the tournament, did not respond to a Reuters request for an updated room update or why the expected housing shortage had not materialised.
Organizers say a range of accommodations are on offer, from $80 a night rooms on the fringes of Doha’s desert to luxury cruise ship cabins, some of which cost thousands of dollars a day.
For the remaining peak nights, the official accommodation portal on Friday showed available rooms at 42 hotels, villas and apartments, while booking.com showed rooms at 73 properties and Airbnb.com showed 503 “houses”.
Eleven days before kick-off, organizers said there would be at least 25,000 rooms available for each night of the World Cup.
Rising prices
In a sign of how pre-tournament fears have fueled expectations among some hoteliers and landlords, Reuters was told of four instances of late price hikes.
A business agent said that a group of 10 guests who arrived in Qatar from Italy a week before the start of the World Cup got into a fight between their hotel and the travel company over an additional charge.
Khia Global told Reuters that in the two weeks leading up to the World Cup it had received demands from each of the seven hotels with an exclusive contract for payments totaling at least $550,000, on top of what it said had paid more than $10 million. . Reuters saw invoices worth $550,000.
Reuters has not seen the full original contract but reviewed a copy of a handwritten $40,000 bill that Khaya Folkard Power chairman said was from the Mansour Park Inn. Neither the hotel nor its owner responded to a Reuters request to confirm the bill.
“I’ve never heard anything like this in a World Cup,” Bauer said of the last-minute deliveries. His agency Khaya has booked block accommodation and sold rooms to fans, FIFA sponsors and other officials at three previous World Cups.
He told Reuters that Bauer’s weary guests were finally checked in after the agency sent the required amount.
Another hotel, the Waterfront Hotel and Apartments, sent a $53,700 bill, seen by Reuters, to guests for extra beds in nine rooms during the tournament, increasing the surcharge from $90 to $250 per night.
Neither the hotel nor its owner responded to repeated requests for comment from Reuters.
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Foreign visitors are not the only ones who have seen the price hike.
The accommodation broker and estate agents said that while some landlords had slashed prices as the tournament approached, many were still trying to secure short-term business at much higher prices, crowding out residents.
Long-term rents in Qatar rose more than 30% in the third quarter, as some landlords demanded that prospective tenants sign two-year leases that lock them in at current rates, according to a Sept. 30 report from real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.
Reuters spoke to long-term residents of five apartment buildings and two apartment blocks in Doha who said that in the months leading up to the tournament, the owners had refused to renew their annual contracts and raised rents.
In The Pearl, an upscale residential neighborhood built on a man-made island, a 30-year-old Tunisian woman whose lease expired in October said her apartment landlord told her he would not renew it until after the World Cup.
The woman, who declined to give her name or identify the owner, said he made it conditioned on her leaving her furniture so he could rent the apartment as a furnished unit.
“I found myself basically forced to accept his offer,” she said, adding that she was worried about committing to exorbitant prices in the long run.
But she still needs to rent a temporary apartment because her brothers, who are football fans, have bought tickets to the tournament.
Reporting and writing by Andrew Mills; Editing by Dominic Evans, Ghaida Ghantous and Alexander Smith
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