Middle East Business
Sharjah developer takes a Dh5 billion twin-tower scheme and will build it with its own contractor
By Staff Writer | 21 August 2026
Arada has unveiled 952 homes in two towers at Broadbeach on the Gold Coast, to be delivered by the tier one contractor it bought in 2025 and targeted for completion before the 2032 Games.
Arada Group has announced a Dh5 billion residential development at Broadbeach on Australia's Gold Coast, put at 1.36 billion dollars. The scheme is two towers connected by a landscaped podium, carrying 952 homes of one, two and three bedrooms, with about 1,200 square metres of ground floor space set aside for retail and hospitality. It is the group's first development outside New South Wales and its largest commitment in Australia since it entered the country in 2024.
Construction will be carried out by Roberts Co, the tier one contractor the group acquired in 2025. Completion is targeted ahead of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Delivering this project through Roberts Co, our own tier-one construction business, means we can bring the quality, pace and accountability that our buyers expect.
Ahmed Alkhoshaibi, Group Chief Executive Officer of Arada
Developer and contractor in the same group
The commercial point sits in that sentence rather than in the value. A developer that owns its main contractor is not procuring the works in the ordinary sense. There is still a building contract, and there will still be a programme, a price and a set of obligations, but both sides of it answer to the same board.
Where developer and contractor share a parent, the contract between them is an internal allocation of risk before it is anything else. It still governs, but the commercial pressure that normally makes a contractor defend its position is not the same pressure.
That arrangement changes several things a claims practitioner would watch. Extension of time and loss and expense between two group companies rarely get argued to a conclusion, so the contemporaneous record that a third party contractor would build as a matter of self-interest may simply not exist. Where the works are later sold to buyers or handed to an owners' corporation, that missing record is the problem, because latent defect and delay questions then have to be reconstructed from a file that was never kept adversarially.
It also changes what subcontractors face. The main contract may be intra-group, but the subcontracts are not, and a subcontractor on a scheme of this kind is dealing with a counterparty whose own margin is set inside a wider development appraisal rather than by a competitive tender. Payment terms, set-off and the treatment of variations are worth reading closely on that basis.
The programme is the exposed number
Completion before the 2032 Games is the only date given, and it is the kind of date that behaves differently from an ordinary contractual completion date. It is fixed by an external event, it cannot move, and it is stated six years out on a scheme that has just been unveiled rather than started.
Nothing has been published on when construction begins, on planning approvals, or on whether the towers are to be built in sequence or together, and the storey heights were not stated in the announcements read. Those are the facts that would show whether the 2032 target has float in it. Without them the date is an intention.
Across Australia the group now describes a pipeline of eight projects and more than 5,000 homes. If that is delivered largely through the contractor it owns, the group is carrying development risk and construction risk on the same balance sheet in a market it entered two years ago. That is the position worth watching, rather than the value of any single scheme.