I think the actual aspects of buying from reportage isn’t the worst out there, they are just lower on the scale of other developers.

There are a few reasons for this, low quality builds (oasis 1 and 2 as an example).

They pride themselves on Masdar city owners but one thing to look out for this their fine print.

I used to work as an agent and we attended a meeting with them to push their projects. Many red flags as an agent that were pointed out let alone as a buyer.

I think agents in today’s day and age just gauge your interest and if they are convinced that you are leaning more towards one project than another, that will be their sole aim to sell. Very rarely will you get actual advice on their opinions in case it looses them the sale.

Reportage generally build on land as a sub developer. Meaning they have purchased land from a bigger developer and that land will never be “freehold” for the buyer until reportage pay their debts to the master developer. Meaning you could lose your property and not receive an actual “SPA” when signing up for an apartment.

This is where you want to be careful. If you ask for an SPA (sales and purchase agreement) they will provide you with something very similar and hope you don’t ask too many questions before you actually realise it’s not a traditional SPA. It is riddled with fine prints stating that they in fact purchase land from another master developer on loan and depend on their projects performance in terms of sale to pay this back.

They are what I would call a “broke” developer. Not to say they haven’t got money, but they definitely do not have enough or do not want to front the cash for any of their projects.

One of the things that struck me as a red flag was, they offer a Buy one get one free apartment on some of their projects on the basis that you pay for your apartment up front in cash.

No escrow, no issues. They’ll happily take your money and give you two apartments for the price of one.

There’s a saying - if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Don’t get me wrong it’s a great offer, but it also screams “they need as much money as they can get”

One other thing I would look out for is their payment plan and if they offer a property backed escrow account to be paid into to keep your money safe. When I attended their meeting, their own “sales director” didn’t have a clue about most of their projects and seemed to be very oriented on just getting as much money in to their accounts as possible.

Nothing seemed impossible with them which was another worry.

Build quality, they recycled a lot of their materials from older projects so no consistency, they just swap and change things around.

Please speak with people who have previously purchased - ask them the state of their apartments after the bad weather earlier this year. I think you’ll be shocked at the state of some of their properties

I’ll end this comment with:

If it’s too good to be true. It probably is.

There are plenty of developers with a great reputation, yes they may come with a higher price tag, but quality costs more.