There must be something in the air in Dubai because it is hard not to fantasise about buying property. Nothing flash, of course, just a six-bedroom villa overlooking Greg Norman’s “Fire” golf course with what the developers describe as a “stunning blush landscape of pink feature planting and annuals”.

The house will be furnished by a Milanese interior designer. The home will come with a 40in flat-screen TV and in-ceiling sound systems. And, for good measure, there’s a free “Greg Norman-inspired Range Rover” thrown in. (What that is, of course, I have no idea: a souped-up, off-road golf buggy?)

After just a week in the Gulf, the luxurious begins to seem commonplace. The ostentatious begins to look natural. And the latest grandiose property venture starts to look like a good deal.

It will cost you 40 million dirhams (£5.32 million) to buy a top of the range villa at the as yet unbuilt Jumeirah Golf Estate but, in the hot and relentlessly upbeat economic climate that is Dubai, that looks like a reasonable investment.

No doubt, the 66 homes on the Fireside estate will be superseded within a matter of weeks by something even more palatial. Residential property in the Gulf should not be bought by investors who fear overbuilding.

Nakheel, the Dubai construction company that poured sand into the sea to build the original Palm development, has two more Palms under construction and has put up more than 50,000 apartments along the coast.

The Palm was made famous by a bunch of sage real estate investors with three lions on their shirts: David Beckham, Michael Owen et al. (Apparently, eight Newcastle United players have owned villas on the island.)

In fact, 27 per cent of the first Palm was snapped up by British buyers. Nearly a third of the homes were bought by people from the Gulf, the vast majority of them by people from Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And for them it has been a great investment.

According to the Palm developers, one house bought halfway down a frond that had not even been built in 2002 cost £575,000; it recently sold for £3.9 million. And by the standards of Malibu, Palm Beach and the Côte d’Azur, the houses are still a bargain on a cost-per-square-foot basis.

And the city has barely tapped regional demand. The Indians, the Iranians, the Russians and, most important, the Saudis have only just begun to shop for property in Dubai.

For a long while yet, there won’t be enough limited-edition Greg Norman Range Rovers to satisfy everybody.

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