My Own Home: Colombian couple fall in love with renovated Dh980,000 Bay Square studio apartment

Camilo Botero and his wife Joy Torres spent Dh120,000 on renovations to their Dubai property

Colombian couple Joy Torres and Camilo Botero in their studio apartment in Bay Square, Business Bay, in Dubai. All photos: Victor Besa / The National

The couple bought the apartment for Dh980,000 ($267,000) in March

They spent two months and Dh120,000 renovating it in a minimalist style

Personal touches add colour and character to the property

The couple completely replaced the kitchen

They used light colours in the renovation, which saw everything from pipes to wiring replaced

The apartment's balcony

Neighbouring buildings viewed from the balcony. Dubai Canal is close by and the apartment is also near the beach

The neighbourhood is predominantly made up of office blocks

The Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum Mosque is also nearby

The gym in the building

Tech expert Mr Botero works from his office space

A view of Bay Square

My Own Home takes you inside a reader-owned property to ask how much they paid, why they decided to buy and what they have done with it since moving in

Camilo Botero, a product manager for Careem, has not lived anywhere but Bay Square, in Business Bay, since he moved to Dubai three years ago – and he has no plans to move anywhere else any time soon.

The Colombian tech expert bought a property there with his wife, Joy Torres, who works for fam Properties, this year for Dh980,000. They have since put Dh120,000 into renovations, transforming the small studio apartment into a light-filled haven that they have both fallen in love with.

The National takes a look around with Mr Botero.

Please tell me about your home.

It is about 670 square feet, including a balcony, in Business Bay, in a community called Bay Square. The size is pretty good. It sucks that we don’t have a wall to separate the bedroom, but there are other studios that are half the size or one-bedrooms that are this size, so in this area it’s the best ratio between size and money.

We also have a Burj Khalifa view. It's nice, I'm in love with this.

Why did you choose Bay Square?

I absolutely love this neighbourhood. This is where I came when I moved to Dubai after the coronavirus [lockdowns], so rent prices were pretty good at the time.

It was pretty scary for me, because I was coming from Colombia where rents are not even close to what you pay here, but this was one of the nicest, not-so-expensive areas.

This community is mostly offices – there are 13 buildings here and a few are half offices with residences, but this is the only building in the whole community that’s fully residential. It’s in very good shape.

It’s never super-painful wherever you have to go in terms of traffic. You can reach anywhere pretty easily. I came here to rent first and just fell in love with it.

Why did you decide to buy?

After the market recovered a little bit after coronavirus, they started selling every single unit. All the tenants who were here got an eviction notice.

I was looking for places to move and the prices had almost doubled everywhere. If I wanted to go any place and pay the same amount I was paying here, it was almost impossible. It would have had to have been a not very nice area or not a very nice unit. So, I had to pay more, that was a fact. My wife works in real estate, so she had information on good opportunities in the area, such as who’s selling and what the last price was, so we decided to go for it.

I had to make the down payment, which was a lot, but then the monthly payments are pretty much the rent price I had before. I figured if I’m going to pay a lot of money on rent, money that’s going to someone else’s pocket, I might as well just put it into my own equity and get an apartment myself.

We got the opportunity in March. It was insane, those months, because I wasn’t planning on buying, so I had to sell everything, like my car, and get savings from absolutely every single corner.

What facilities do you have access to?

First, it’s a nice community, it’s somewhere that you can walk around. We have restaurants, supermarkets – we have a Choithrams here – and a UFC gym.

In the building we have another gym, which is a little smaller. We have a pool on the roof and a games room where there’s billiards and ping pong. The Dubai Canal is also close by, so we can run or cycle. We’re very close to the beach as well.

What renovations have you done?

We moved in after two months of renovation work. It's a small studio, so it shouldn't have taken that long, but we did a bunch of changes. It's not like just wrapping and making it look nice – we redid everything. We did the electrical outlets, we did the pipes, the sink, tore down the kitchen, changed the bathroom.

We tried to make it minimalistic, we don't have too much stuff, and used light colours.

How was the renovations process?

The problems I had with the renovation work were not problems you would expect to have. You understand it will never be smooth, but some things that happened were mind-blowing. For instance, if they needed to drill a hole in the wall, they didn’t care how they made the hole, and they would put live wires on the cement and then just cover them.

They didn’t have the proper tools. It was people who didn’t care and who were not prepared. It was tough. I had to spend most of my vacation time just being on top of them, because no one was here checking what they were doing.

When it was finally done, it was a relief. After the dust and chaos of the initial months, it was great just to lie on the bed and look around and see what we did. It was the best feeling ever.

How long will you be in this property for?

That's a good question. It’s Dubai, so you never know. My plan is to stay here at least two years. That's the minimum I would like to stay here for it to make sense financially.

Then we can rent it out. If I rent right now at an average price for this building and this unit, I will just break even. I will not make money, at least not for now.