So I asked a simple question on twitter yesterday. I asked people to name ONE place that stands out in their minds where they got great customer services in Qatar. Some interesting results. Some I didn’t expect myself. Without further adue I present all the responses! (In no particular order!)

Nissan – Infiniti division – @iknw101

TableArts – @Shanti_eka

Grandhyatt – @haniarif

The Ritz – @bradycreel

Ritz @expatcookie

FFC @vanish_forever

Sushi Minto @jmugford

Vodafone Landmark – @_maricala

Khan Farooq – @theesal

VLCC @cameliacesin

GlowSalonDoha – @jodygryan

WafiGourmet – @halawala

Café Tasse – @abuarja7

W Doha – @MaryH_K

Jumbo – @rainydoha

BMW – @shivasingh

W Doha – @sweetymathewB

Yoko Sizzlers – @Qatarday

Carluccios – @dohaben

Woqod near the Mall – @jibbersindoha

Sadly things have happened and it’s set me back a bit. Sorry to let everyone down. I know many people are excited to see what I have in store…

I thought I might shed some light as to what’s the ‘norm’ when it comes to buying a property and what to do after hand-over.
I’ve recently had the delightful news of having the keys being handed over to me at the Porto Arabia project at The Pearl. I have to admit that I was SHOCKED at the fact that I could hardly find any issues to raise before agreeing to sign the handover form. I’m serious… I did find that one of the sockets was slightly wonky and a bit of paint on one of the tiles but that was it.

For a moment I had thought, wow… they’ve really stepped up their game (side note: different properties have different developers by the way). I was sadly disappointed though when I received an email from the Pearl telling me that I had to sign a document that agreed to The Pearl Owners corporation to maintain the building. It also included ‘community rules’, insurance, and so on. (Wait a minute… I didn’t agree to any community rules… the tenants association should be the ones putting this together in the first place).

Now what annoyed me was how the letter started in explaining that they are appointed by the pearl. As if it’s a done deal. Wait a minute.. we don’t have a choice here? That means they could turn around at any time and say 1 million riyal service charge please.

In this case it had also said that I needed to pay 12,000 in maintanence fees for the year. (It’s a 1 bedroom apartment).

I didn’t hesitate in picking up the phone and contacting one of the property managers at The Pearl to ask about what was going on.

I first started off the phone call by saying that I was surprised by an email I got but before explaining what the email contained, I wanted to know if what I was about to explain was the norm and if the manager agreed with me.

Usually once an apartment is handed over, the developers maintain the property for the period of one year. This is to ensure that any issues with the building, common areas, and so on are taken care of (as it’s part of the snagging process). When reaching the end of the year, a tenants association is put together and they represent the tenants in the building. The tenants association is supposed to take tenders from different management companies and then select the one that would be the best to manage the property on behalf of the tenants.

Usually for at least three months, a maintenance fee is NOT paid. This is because tenants should not have to pay to repair a brand new building. I should also get a copy of what they propose, rules, how they calculate the charges etc..

The manager agreed. I then explained the contents of the email and what I was being asked to sign. He promised to look into this and get back to me.

Now once I hear back, I’ll post an update to this post so check back for more and in the  mean-time, I recommend that you do NOT sign any documents committing to anything after hand-over.

I really do hope this isn’t a case of ‘Buy an apartment from the pearl, be forced to pay a company appointed by the pearl, pay whatever fees the pearl wants, and live by the pearl’s rules as well’.

Not really worth the price of sacrificing freedom in my opinion. This would be another example for why not to buy in Qatar at the moment if this is true… (I really do hope I’m wrong!)

So Dine Out Doha has been getting off to a great start and the reviews and comments are starting to come in! Exciting stuff!

If you haven’t been yet, click here for Dine Out Doha. Be sure to start rating, commenting, posting micro-reviews or even submitting your full fledged restaurant reviews too!

Now you’ll remember we launched what we called the Beta of I Love Qatar at http://beta.iloveqatar.net (it’s actually an alpha). We did something special which was taking the link live even though it was still being built! We did that so that people could watch the site come together! Now the great news is that we should be around 2 and half weeks away from completion!

What’s even more exciting is that we’re going to revealing the awesome new MyLife function as well as the new ILQ Originals which will host a great amount of original content too! We’ve got some great Qatari comics, Online videos, skits, and some stuff that’s under wraps for the moment too.

In the mean while, you can go ahead and sign in (or sign up) in the beta section of ILQ and play around by posting events in the new event section or even start posting in the new forums.

(Don’t worry, you won’t lose anything once we remove the ‘beta’ tag from it).

Anyway! That’s my update!

It’s been a tiring three days at QITCOM but I just had to blog about this as soon as I got home!

iLoveQatar.net won best start up for 2011 and I won Qatar’s Top Entrepreneur as well! I’m so honored  for winning but even more so I feel energized and appreciate the acknowledgement that the people gave. Not only was it a panel of judges that judged the various projects but the public were the ones who voted.

It was something unexpected.

I’m disappointed with the fact that I was unable to attend the Gala Dinner. It had started at 8pm however I was wrapping up the ILQ booth at QITCOM, left at 8:30 and then was stuck in traffic for 30 minutes before deciding to go off to Central Lounge with Bassam Al Ibrahim (iLoveQatar.net’s co-founder), Moh’d Al Ibrahim (an awesome Director or Producer from DFI), and Josh Weiner (A seriously impressive entrepreneur himself!). We were recapping everything we went through and thinking about all the new ideas we had just shared with everyone (more to come on that!).

Earlier in the day we were Interviewed by BBC World, had an interview with QF Radio and I was in the newspaper for unveiling Vodafone’s latest project SouqIt.com.

We also put together a little video showing off the other start ups and business in Qatar and interviewed some great people ourselves. On the first day of Qitcom, the Minister of Business and Trade came on down to our booth along with Sheikha Mayasa, and commented on how proud they were of iLoveQatar.net and even gave us some suggestions too.

I feel so pumped! I can’t wait to show everyone the final video of what we put together for Qitcom. It truly was an amazing exhibition, you would never know that this is the first time it’s ever happened in Qatar from how buzzed it was. And I’m not just saying that because I won an award!

Qatar really is the place to be right now.

Update: I’ve just been told that we’ve actually won FOUR awards. One for Best Social Media website in Qatar and the other for a brand new idea we have to help match quality Qataris with companies in Qatar.

Check out my interview with Doha Luxury

http://www.dohaluxury.com/qatarportraits/khalifa-saleh-haroon/

So it’s clear to me that the real estate market in Qatar is messed up. Who agrees with me? No? You think that things are great?; then I shall break it down for you with some examples.

Let’s say you bought a property in Zig Zag towers. You paid well over a million Qatari Riyals because you were promised the best in luxury. You think to yourself, I’m going to be living in an amazing peice of architecture, instead, all you get is what can only be described as a wonky building.

The banks:
To buy that lovely apartment, you need to take a loan. QNB’s interest rate for me was something like 9.7% (I know I know). At 25 years that’s around 11,000 QR per month. Recently I was offered an amazing deal from Doha bank that would lower my installments by 3k and also shave off 5 years. Nice! Sadly I can’t switch. Qatar’s introduced a new law that doesn’t allow banks to buy off loans… so I’m stuck with QNB. (This law was most probably passed because QNB was losing customers and so needed some good ‘ole wasta).

Central cooling:
So I’m stuck with using Qatar Cool. A monopoly since there is no other company other than them that provides this service. They want around 12,000 QR per year so that you can be provided with a service that would otherwise have cost me 50-100QR extra a month (since I still have to pay for water and electricity anyway!) if I just had a split unit. I’m sorry, I really DO care about the environment, but who are we fooling? The carbon emissions are simply being moved to the central cooling facility. We’ve just moved the problem, we haven’t solved it…

The developers:
So Al Dar, the company that sold ZigZag, took the first year’s ‘maintenance fee’ and did nothing for the tenants. 2 year later, and countless days of fire alarms going off, leaks in the underground parking, filthy marble floors and me staring at a tic-tac-toe game that was scratched into the stainless steel door of one of the elevators, they decided to go ahead and create the tenants committee. What they did was dump all of their dirty laundry with them and didn’t even bother to give them the maintenance fee from the previous year!

The late fee:
According to Al Dar, the late fee is automatically waived if you buy the property from second party. Wait what? So Al Dar was supposed to pay 1,000 QR a month for every month they were late with the development. They didn’t finish the property until a year and a half later (they had 6 months delay allowable), so they had to pay 12,000 QR to me. Nope, I bought that apartment from someone so they automatically got up to THREE YEARS extra time to delay the project. How does Qatar legally allow that? I’ll tell you how, we don’t have a Land Law court. Going to Civil court takes an average of two years here…

The maintenance fee:
So the tenants council mentioned that they were thinking of a way to make the maintenance fee a bit more fair. It’s currently set at 1% of what you bought the property for. I had wanted it to be a fixed price per square meter. It makes logical sense to me that they should first calculate the cost of what was needed for the maintenance and then divide it by the total number of square meters. Nope, they decided that if it’s from below 90 Sqm it’s 11,000 QR, 100-150sqm it’s 14,500 QR, if it’s 151-200sqm it’s 17,500 QR , if it’s 201-250sqm its 19,800 QR and if its 250sqm its 21,000 QR(something like that anyway, if you’ve got the exacts let me know as I cant remember).
How the hell is that fair? Long story short, I’m paying 2,000 QR MORE now for my 147sqm apartment and 10,000 QR more for my 250SQM apartment I bought a while back. I guess to the association I’m paying ‘fairly more’. Their math doesn’t even make sense. The different between a property that’s 250sqm and one that’s larger than that is 1,200 QR, that means 1,200 QR / 50 (sqm) is 24QR per sqm. But the difference between a 93sqm tier and a 100sqm tier is 3,500 QR which means that it’s an extra 70 QR per sqm. That means that the smaller your apartment, the more you pay… Shouldn’t it be set so that we all pay equally per square meter as I had just mentioned?

So now let’s do the math. For a fully furnished and redone apartment like mine that’s 147sqm, on the 21st floor, and facing the lagoon, I could probably get 10-12k (depends really). Let’s say 10k for arguments sake.

I’ve got to pay 11,000 QR a month for the mortgage, 12,000 QR a year for Central cooling, 14,000 QR for a maintenance fee, which means that over 2 months of rent goes straight to fees and even after that all the rent goes straight to the bank. It’s actually BETTER for an owner to just RENT than buy in this country!

If you’re confused by the time you get to the end of this blog post. Good. We all are.

What… the… hell…? Qatar! Help us! Help place rules and regulations in the country to help the real estate sector. Companies like Al Dar are causing foreign investors to lose faith in our market.

Soon after the Big Day Out, we embarked on our next charitable project at ILQ. It was time to go ahead and show the country that gave us Land Cruisers that we appreciate them. Qatar without Land Cruisers just isn’t Qatar! We already did have a booth at the Big Day Out where we raised money for Japan (as well as gave out some awesome freebies like footballs with 2022 on them), but we wanted to do more. So we posted and tweeted that we’d be selling special t-shirts that were had writing in Japanese and Arabic. (I’ve never seen a t-shirt with those two languages before by the way). Our forum user, and the person in charge of the Japanese Society Qatar (JaSoQa), Daisy said that we should use the words Hope, Love, Brave, Happiness, and Peace. She even went as far as making sure that each color chosen was the right one.

Jim, one of the senior managers over at Landmark group went ahead and offered us space at Villaggio and Landmark (we are very thankful to them!) in order to sell the t-shirts; and it was with that we embarked on our mission. There were some fantastic people from ILQ and the Japanese community (thanks to Kasumi, Hiromi, Yoshiko, Joel and his friends, Kinimoto (who was dressed up as Naruto!), Ryan, Ellie, Joann, Zhan, Keiko and family, and Daisy) that manned the various booths.

So far, we’ve managed to raise over 16,000 QR selling the t-shirts and we’ve now been offered space at the Hyatt Plaza to do the same this Thursday and Friday as well. We’ll be giving the money to the Japanese embassy to do as they see fit.

I’d like to thank all of the kind souls out there that donated and helped us! I’m so very glad that everyone left feeling as if they had achieved something important with their time.

Now for my next ultimate challenge… find a someone to wash my car and guarantee it won’t rain the next day. Anyone?

Time to edify! People are probably wondering, “where’s the next rant or humorous misadventure?”, well I’m here to say that this latest blog is all about fun again and making a difference in the world! The guys over at Global DJs contacted iLoveQatar with a simple thought, “How can we do something that will be fun, engaging and memorable?” We brainstormed a bit and we discussed wanting to be as inclusive as possible.

We didn’t want this to be ‘one-type-of-person-type-of-party’; and so the Big Day Out was born. A two day festival (14th for all ages and 15th for 21+) and bands from the US, UK, Romania, Jamaica, Qatar, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Philippines and more would be coming. Awesome, so we’ve got all age groups and different nationalities, what next? How long should the event be per day? All day if we can! (15th is from 2pm to 2am). That way we can make sure that everyone can come on down any time of day. Next? Types of acts! We’ve got some current celebrities, some amazing blasts from the pasts, fast rising stars, and local acts. SWEEET, so we’ve got different types of acts but what big bands do we bring over? And so, as if SNL had inspired us a few weeks earlier, we signed up Hoobastank. Next? It’s becoming hot now and Qatar’s got a great deal of something it’s called SUNSHINE (You probably thought that I was going to say Cruisers or Sand, but sadly there’s no famous song for that), so we signed up Aswad and made sure that they were going to perform their smash hit ‘Shine’. Now we need to make sure that people dance until the moon comes out, you know it, we’ve got TopLoader signed too. The list goes on. 16 bands long actually! Click here for the full line up.

You can find some information here www.iloveqatar.net/bigdayout

Just to add more on that, this is Qatar’s first music festival, we’ve created a festival that mirrors Qatari society. Qatar is a great country that is a melting pot for all nationalities to come, live, and even help build this country. We wanted the festival to reflect the many different nationalities in Qatar.

At the event there will also be competitions to win prizes such as iPods, iPhones and Blackberries. Vodafone will also be giving away free sim cards with credit to people who come to the event! A chance for people to maybe call their friends and let them hear what’s happening at The Big Day Out! We haven’t even touched on the ILQ freebies too! On the 14th it’s going to be focused on families where there will be fun, games, face painting, food, toys, gifts, and of course various entertainment.

Since we want to make a difference, all profit and proceeds that are collected by iLoveQatar.net will be donated to the earthquake victims in Japan in Qatar’s name. We’ll be selling these AWESOME Japanese designed shirts for around 40 QR (I think).

We are also giving people the chance to become a star! People just need to record a video of themselves singing a song or doing something entertaining, upload the video to youtube and send the link to contact@iloveqatar.net
The rule is that people have to start the video by saying “Hi my name is _________ and this is for The Big Day Out“.

The best ones will be shown on the GIANT screen on stage. Who knows, since there will be so many bands and singers, there could be a chance that they are selected by the band managers and be the next celebrity.

Finally we’re going to be auctioning off FIVE t-shirts with all the different bands signatures on it. The money we get will be given to charitable causes as well.

iLoveQatar.net has become a brand and we’re still committed to our core vision; to making Qatar a better place. This time we’re helping to put on the Big Day Out to make everyone in Qatar feel at home and welcome in Qatar.

OH! And since you’ve got to the end of the blog post, here’s a nice little competition so that you can WIN tickets to the event (we’re giving away 10!). Click here.

Mr. Bassam Al Muharaj ( بسام المهرج)made a special announcement today in Qatar that is said to improve the state of the nation drastically in the coming years. The Ministry of Logic was recently opened in Al Ghashmara road in hopes of rejuvenating a sense of faith in the progression of infrastructure development. Al Muharaj gave a few examples during his explanation, “Should a law wish to be created where a person had to build a house in order to apply for a land to build that house, then it would be rejected on grounds of inappropriate use of logic.”.

The Qatari Ministry of Logic is said to have recently been set up due to the massive amount of irregularities emerging from existing Ministries operations. Three reports had concluded that there are issues with infrastructure, national projects, and day to day activities. A recent survey found that the communities’ top three complaints were 1) The fact that roadworks takes an average of 6 years only to be destroyed to make way for a future project 2) That skyscrapers, towers, and commercial districts were built with no parking areas 3) Prison sentences did not have any logical pattern in terms of judgement.

Mr. Al Muharaj was kind enough to point out that the Ministry of Logic would act as a filter before other Ministries and Authorities could act. He was also quite proud of the fact that the team put in place were amongst the brightest in the world.

Recently it was reported that projects such as Qatar Cool, which was supposed to be both an environmentally friendly solution to central cooling as well as a cost effective alternative to standard split unit air conditioning, simple did not make sense. Prices were found to be up to 30% above an average electricity and water charge and the cost of piping and connections was 5 times higher than installation of split units. It was also found that from an environmental perspective, although carbon emissions were reduced from areas that we centrally cooled, the location of Qatar Cool’s facility actually produced carbon emissions that were equally as high thus defeating it’s purpose. The Ministry of Logic’s role would be to ensure that projects such as these are studied and thought through carefully.

Mr. Al Muharaj said, ‘Not only are we proud of this new initiative, but we are are also taking measures to create the correct policies and procedures in place to ensure that adequate logic is injected into projects related to the country and it’s people. We have in fact created a new policy for what is the correct method of creating the correct policies and procedures and will ensure that a study is created to measure the effectiveness of our policy.’. Mr. Al Muharaj would not comment on the necessity for the creation of the Authority of Redundancy and Bureaucracy Authority Bureau.

All comments and suggestions can be emailed to the Ministry of Logic. The email may be obtained by faxing 4478339222 with a request.

Source, http://iloveqatar.net/forum/read.php?28,27612,27612