Last Friday the 155th floor was completed on Burj Dubai. By yesterday the 156th floor was finished on a building that, at 585.7m (1,922ft) and still growing, is already the world’s tallest tower block.

By the time that Emaar, the largest property company in Dubai, completes the Burj (the Tower), it will rise to 164 floors, to be capped by a spire that will add a few more precious metres. The developers are said to be able to add on more floors if they wish at a later date to ensure that the Burj can see off any competition that might threaten its status as the world’s tallest building.

Such figures set pulses racing in Dubai, a city that resembles a cross between Vancouver and Manhattan, with a smack of the garish self-confidence that hitherto only Las Vegas could muster. Local master planners privately refer to developers’ love of skyscrapers as “architorture”.

It is not only the property developers who are in thrall to what locals regard as an obsession with everything ending in “est”: biggest, tallest, best. The emirate’s rapidly growing population – 30,000 people arrive each month – has bought into a vision of world domination handed down from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum to the people he governs as absolute ruler.

People in Dubai who can spare a few thousand dirhams are playing the property game. If they are not working directly in real estate – and that includes a considerable proportion of the population – most are in property investment speculation, buying half a dozen flats at a time off-plan and holding them until completion or “flipping” them – selling the rights to the homes for a profit within a year.

Prices of Dubai apartments have soared 125 per cent over the past year around the Burj, catalysed by new laws that came into force only at the start of this year allowing, for the first time, foreign ownership of residential property. House-price inflation in other parts of the city has risen by between 20 per cent and 100 per cent over the past year, mirroring similar rates of annual inflation every year since the turn of the millennium.

Dozens of high-rise luxury apartment blocks litter Dubai, all about 97 per cent let. Scores of similar projects are under way, dominated by the big players, such as Emaar, the largest quoted developer, Nakheel and Dubai Properties, which are controlled by the State, and Damac Holding, one of the emirate’s largest privately run residential property developers and owned by Hussain Sajwani. Damac has 79 housing blocks under development and the company will have handed more than 10 per cent of its presold properties by the end of the year.

By the time that Damac lays the first brick on a tower block, it will have presold about 80 per cent of the units with cash in the bank – buyers pay by instalment – covering about 40 per cent of the built value of the entire site. That means that Damac has broken even on its tower blocks before it has started construction.

“In just under five years we have moved 11,000 units to 116 nationalities,” Peter Riddich, the chief executive of Damac, said. British citizens account for about 30 per cent of Damac’s buyers, followed by nearly as many Iranian purchasers, with the balance dominated by a mix from India, Pakistan, other Gulf states, Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union.

Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai and Vice-President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, has a vision to transform Dubai into a huge financial trading centre. The idea is to attract massive amounts of foreign workers and capital to an emirate that did not have the natural resources of Abu Dhabi, its larger, oil-rich neighbour. One of the key methods of his strategy has been to turn Dubai from a sleepy town into a huge building zone, which is starting to rival Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, in population.

Blair Hagkull, managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle, the property agency, who is based in Dubai said: “We are halfway through a 30-year cycle and, at the end of it, Dubai will be where other cities took 100 years.”

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