Lubana Island, Amazi — Freehold Waterfront Residences in Hawana Salalah, Oman

Lubana Island, Amazi — freehold lagoon villas at Hawana Salalah, Oman

Lubana Island is a gated waterfront community inside Amazi, the residential quarter of Hawana Salalah — the established Integrated Tourism Complex on Oman’s Dhofar coast, about 8 km west of Salalah city. The masterplan threads detached villas and connected chalets through a system of swimmable lagoons and navigable water canals, so that almost every home fronts water on at least one side. The name comes from lubān, the Arabic word for frankincense: the resin that made this coast wealthy two thousand years ago, and the stated design theme of the whole community.

This matters for one reason above all others, and it is the reason Lubana reads so differently from the beachfront projects further east at Taqah. Hawana Salalah is a designated ITC, so foreign buyers here get genuine freehold title — not a 99-year lease, not an undeclared interest. That single fact separates it from The Sea Front Residences and Taqah Long Beach Boutique, the two nearest coastal alternatives, and it is what most international buyers in Dhofar are actually looking for.

There is, however, a three-year contradiction between the two documents in front of us about when you can move in. We deal with that first, because everything else depends on it.

Key facts

Move-in ready, or 2029? The documents disagree by three years

The broker sales sheet lists the completion date as “Move-in-ready”. The developer’s own presentation ends with a full-page statement, set in large type over a photograph of the Dhofar mountains: “The project will be ready in 2029.”

Both documents are dated February 2026. They cannot both be describing the same thing, and the gap is not a rounding error — it is three years and the difference between buying a finished home and buying off-plan.

On the evidence, 2029 is far more likely to be right for Lubana Island specifically, for three reasons:

• The payment plan only makes sense off-plan. Ten per cent on booking followed by 7.5% every three months for three years is a construction-linked schedule. Completed homes are not normally sold on three-year interest-free instalments; developers use that structure precisely because the building is being financed as it goes up. The plan’s own three-year length lands squarely on 2029.
• The statement is the developer’s, not the broker’s. The 2029 date appears in Muriya’s presentation, as a deliberate closing slide. “Move-in-ready” appears in a field on an aggregator sheet, of the kind that is frequently inherited from a parent record.
• Amazi is not Lubana. Amazi is the wider residential district, and parts of it are complete and occupied — Hawana Salalah has delivered more than 1,000 homes overall. A status of “move-in ready” is entirely plausible for Amazi and simply wrong for the newest community inside it.

We cannot resolve this from the documents alone, and you should not have to. Ask for the contractual handover date in writing, in the sale and purchase agreement, before you pay a booking deposit. If the answer is 2029, then the delay-compensation clause and the escrow arrangements matter a great deal; if the answer is that specific completed units exist today, ask which ones, and go and stand in them. The five available units may well include both.

Freehold ownership and residency

This is where Lubana Island is genuinely strong, and it is worth being precise about why.

Foreign freehold in Oman derives from Sultani Decree 12/2006, which permits non-citizen ownership inside approved Integrated Tourism Complexes. Hawana Salalah is one of them — the established ITC of the Dhofar region, developed under licence and selling to international buyers since well before the current wave of Omani coastal projects. Title here is freehold, registrable, inheritable and sellable on the open market to another foreign buyer. That is a materially different asset from a leasehold interest outside an ITC.

The Golden Residency threshold deserves its own arithmetic, because the entry prices do not reach it. OMR 200,000 is about $520,160. At the apartments’ rate of roughly $359 per square foot, that implies about 1,449 sq ft; at the villas’ roughly $381 per square foot, about 1,365 sq ft. Both figures sit above the brochure’s largest published layout of 145 m² (1,561 sq ft) only narrowly — which means:

• The entry apartment at $258,800 (OMR 99,508) is at roughly half the Golden Residency threshold. It does not qualify.
• The entry villa at $352,700 (OMR 135,612) is at roughly two thirds. It does not qualify either.
• A buyer who specifically wants the ten-year Golden Residency needs to be looking at the larger three-bedroom villas near the top of the range, and should have the qualifying value confirmed in writing before committing.

This is the single most common misunderstanding we see on ITC projects: buyers assume that because the development qualifies, every unit in it qualifies. It does not — the threshold is on the value of the property, not the status of the scheme. Verify title registration with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and take independent Omani legal advice on which residency route your specific purchase supports.

The residences

Lubana Island offers detached villas and connected chalets in one, two and three bedrooms, plus apartments. Every home is oriented towards water, with a private garden and courtyard designed to take sun loungers beside a plunge pool or a barbecue setting. The developer describes the interior transition as deliberately soft — floor-to-ceiling glazing, milky-toned finishes, and gardens that read as an extension of the living space rather than a boundary.

The single dimensioned plan in the brochure is worth studying, because it tells you what “villa” means here. The two-bedroom villa is 110 m² of built-up area on a 545 m² plot — a compact single-storey house on a plot roughly five times its footprint. That ratio is the point of the product: the land, the garden and the water frontage are the luxury, not the internal square metreage. Anyone comparing the headline size against a city apartment is measuring the wrong thing.

One size figure that does not reconcile

The brochure’s layouts page states a range of 67–145 m², which is 721–1,561 sq ft. The sales sheet’s headline range is 721–4,564 sq ft. The floors agree exactly at 721 sq ft; the ceilings differ by a factor of nearly three.

The most plausible explanation is that 4,564 sq ft (424 m²) is a plot area, not a built area — plot sizes on this product genuinely run to several hundred square metres, as the 545 m² worked example shows. If so, the sheet is mixing two different measurements in a single range, which would make a buyer comparing “size” across listings materially wrong about what they are getting. Ask for built-up area and plot area as two separate, stated numbers for the specific unit you are offered.

Pricing

All conversions use 1 OMR = 2.6008 USD. Against the rest of our Oman coverage, Lubana sits near the top:

Lubana is the second most expensive project per square foot in our Oman portfolio, behind only a branded Mandarin Oriental residence in the capital, and roughly 75% above the leasehold studios at Taqah down the coast. Whether that is expensive depends entirely on what you think you are buying. On built-up area alone it looks steep. Counting the plot — 545 m² of private land on the worked example — the water frontage, the freehold title and a functioning resort with hotels, a marina and a beach club already operating around it, the premium is doing identifiable work. The comparison that matters is not against a Muscat apartment but against the other freehold options inside Dhofar, of which there are very few.

The price has softened since February

The sales sheet records a February 2026 starting price of OMR 105,000 — about $273,084 — against a current apartment entry of $258,800, or OMR 99,508. In riyal terms that is a fall of roughly 5.2% over six months.

Read that carefully rather than as a discount. With only five units left, a moving “from” price usually reflects which units remain rather than a repricing of the scheme — and the sheet does not say whether the February figure referred to an apartment or a villa, which matters, since the two entry points differ by over a third. Ask for the price history of the specific unit type you want, and for confirmation of what the February figure described.

What is not published

Neither document states a service charge, and neither carries mortgage information. On a community with swimmable lagoons, navigable canals, landscaped gardens, a beach club, a wellness centre and a clubhouse, the service charge is not a rounding error — maintained water bodies are among the more expensive amenities to run. For scale, elsewhere in our Oman coverage Alef Qurum Residence charges 5.00 OMR/m² and Telal Al Qurm 4.50 OMR/m². Those are comparators from a different product type, not this project’s rate — get the actual figure, and ask what it covers and how it is governed. Omani banks lend to non-residents at roughly 70% loan-to-value at around 6.00% a year, with benchmarks published by the Central Bank of Oman; freehold ITC title is the easiest Omani security to finance, which is a real advantage here.

The payment plan, and the 7.5% it does not account for

The published terms are unusually buyer-friendly:

Ten per cent plus eleven instalments of 7.5% comes to 92.5%, not 100%. The missing 7.5% is almost certainly a final payment on handover — which is the normal structure, and which fits neatly with a 2029 completion three years after a 2026 booking. But the sheet does not say so, and a payment schedule that does not add up to the purchase price is exactly the sort of thing to have clarified in writing rather than assumed. Ask for the full schedule with dates and amounts, including the final payment and what triggers it.

Taken at face value, this is a genuinely attractive plan: three years of interest-free quarterly instalments, with no bank involved, on freehold title. It is also the strongest single piece of evidence that this is an off-plan purchase rather than a completed one.

Location: Hawana Salalah

Hawana Salalah occupies about 7 km of white-sand beach on the Dhofar coast west of Salalah city, with the Indian Ocean on one side and the Dhofar mountains behind. Lubana Island sits within it, on the lagoon system towards the eastern end of the resort.

Note that the airport figure is given differently in each document — the brochure says 20 minutes, the sales sheet says around 30 minutes. The straight-line distance is under 9 km, so both are plausible depending on the route around the bay; budget for the longer one.

A warning about the map coordinate

The sales sheet publishes a Plus Code of 28M6+VWC for this project. Decoded, that resolves to 17.0347° N, 54.3122° E — a point on the coast roughly 31 km east of Hawana Salalah, between Salalah and Taqah, and nowhere near the resort. Hawana Salalah lies west of Salalah city; the published coordinate is well to the east of it.

We checked our decoder against a known reference before saying so, and it reproduces published coordinates correctly elsewhere. Do not navigate to that Plus Code. If you are arranging a viewing, use the Hawana Salalah resort entrance as your destination and have the sales office confirm the plot location within the masterplan on site.

What is already built around it

The strongest argument for Hawana Salalah is that it is not a promise. The resort is operating, and a buyer at Lubana is joining infrastructure that already exists rather than one that is drawn:

Day-to-day amenities nearby are correspondingly real: Simba’s Kids Club, Good Source Market, Marina Mart, Breakers Restaurant, Cocos Bar and Zanzi Bar are all within about six or seven minutes by car. For a Dhofar purchase, that is an unusually complete environment — and it is the clearest practical difference between buying here and buying on an isolated stretch of coast further east.

Why Dhofar draws buyers

Dhofar is unlike anywhere else on the Arabian Peninsula. From roughly June to September the khareef — the Indian Ocean monsoon — turns the mountains behind Salalah green, drops temperatures into the low twenties, and brings hundreds of thousands of Gulf visitors escaping the summer heat. The developer’s own presentation leans on this hard, describing Salalah as the southern “Maldives” of Oman and citing its placement among the world’s notable destinations in international travel rankings.

The landscape backs the pitch up. Wadi Darbat, about 47 km east, fills with waterfalls and lakes during and after the khareef. Sumhuram at Khor Rori forms part of the UNESCO “Land of Frankincense” inscription — the third-century-BC port from which the resin that gives Lubana its name left for the ancient world. Al Husn Palace, the 18th-century Sultan’s palace, stands in Salalah itself. Regional tourism information is published by Experience Oman and policy by the Ministry of Heritage and Tourism.

Amenities

Lubana’s own amenities are built around water, and the resort adds a second layer around them.

The lagoons are the distinguishing feature and worth separating from marketing language: these are swimmable water bodies with canals you can actually paddle, not ornamental water. That is what produces the “island” in the name, and it is why almost every plot has a water edge. It is also, as noted above, why the unpublished service charge deserves a firm answer — maintained lagoon systems are not cheap to run, and the cost is shared among the households that enjoy them.

The developer

There are two names attached to this project and both are correct, which sometimes causes confusion.

Muriya is the developer of record in Oman — a joint venture between Orascom Development and Oman’s government-backed Omran Group, created to build the Sultanate’s integrated tourism destinations. Muriya’s two flagship ITCs are Hawana Salalah in Dhofar and Jebel Sifah near Muscat. The broker sheet credits Orascom directly, which is accurate at the parent level.

Orascom Development has been building integrated resort destinations since 1989. Its portfolio spans Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, with a land bank of more than 100 million m² and a hospitality arm of 34 hotels and over 7,000 rooms. Its landmark destinations are El Gouna in Egypt, Andermatt in the Swiss Alps and Luštica Bay in Montenegro, alongside the two Omani ITCs.

This is the most substantial development track record of any project in our Oman coverage, and it changes the character of the due diligence. The questions are less about whether the developer will finish and more about the specifics: the contractual handover date, the escrow account holding buyer funds, the delay-compensation clause, and the service-charge regime and community governance once the community is handed over. You can see the same developer’s work at Jebel Sifah in our listings for Rihanna, Solar Residences and Olive Farms, and in the Jebel Sifah land plots and Salalah land plots.

How it compares

Within Dhofar the choice is unusually stark. Lubana Island is the freehold option; the Taqah projects are not. The Sea Front gives you a furnished studio directly on the sand at roughly half the price per square foot, on a 99-year lease. Taqah Long Beach Boutique gives you a larger one-bedroom, nearly ready, with no tenure declared at all. Lubana gives you land, water frontage, a functioning resort and a title you can register, sell and pass on — at a price that reflects all four, and on a timeline that needs pinning down before you sign. If freehold matters to you in Dhofar, the comparison is short, and this is the top of it.

Rental outlook

Lubana’s letting case is stronger than the Taqah alternatives for a structural reason: it sits inside an operating resort with hotels, a marina, a beach club and a water park already drawing visitors. A short-let owner here is renting into demand that Hawana Salalah generates year-round rather than creating demand from scratch on an empty beach.

The khareef still dominates. June to September fills Dhofar with Gulf families, and short-let rates in the Salalah area rise sharply through it. A two- or three-bedroom villa with a private garden and a lagoon frontage is well matched to exactly that market — family groups, staying a week or more, for whom the plot and the water access are the product.

Three qualifications. The season is concentrated, and a market that packs its demand into roughly a quarter of the year yields very differently from one with even occupancy; the service charge, whatever it turns out to be, runs for twelve months. Completion timing decides when you can start — if 2029 is right, this is an investment that produces nothing for three years, which changes the return calculation entirely. And supply across Dhofar is rising, with several hundred units coming from the Taqah developments alone into the same seasonal window, albeit at a different price point and quality level. Model net rent after service charge, management, voids and seasonality rather than from peak nightly rates. Oman levies no personal income tax on rental earnings; official statistics come from the National Centre for Statistics and Information and investor incentives from Invest Oman.

Why Oman

Oman makes a quieter proposition than its Gulf neighbours, and Dhofar is its quietest corner. The Sultanate ranks among the safest countries in the world on Numbeo‘s indices, living costs run below neighbouring Gulf states — a point the developer’s own presentation makes explicitly — and there is no personal income tax on rental earnings. Salalah International Airport, under 9 km away, connects the region to the Gulf and to seasonal international routes. General country information is published at oman.om and current affairs by the Times of Oman.

Questions to ask before reserving

• Completion, first and in writing: Move-in ready or 2029? The sheet says one, the developer’s presentation says the other. Get the contractual handover date in the sale agreement.
• Which of the five: Apartment or villa, how many bedrooms, which plot, and what is its water frontage?
• Built-up area and plot area, separately: The sheet’s 4,564 sq ft ceiling looks like a plot figure inside a built-area range. Get both numbers stated.
• Golden Residency: Does this specific unit reach OMR 200,000? The entry apartment and entry villa do not. Have the qualifying value confirmed before relying on it.
• Service charge: Unpublished. Get the rate, what it covers, how the lagoons and canals are maintained and funded, and how the community is governed.
• The full payment schedule: The published plan totals 92.5%. Where does the remaining 7.5% fall, and what triggers it?
• Escrow and delay: Which regulated account holds buyer funds, and what compensation applies if handover slips beyond the contractual date?
• Financing: Freehold ITC title is the most financeable in Oman — ask which banks will lend on this project and on what terms.
• The map coordinate: The published Plus Code points about 31 km east of the resort. Get the plot location confirmed on the masterplan, on site.
• Rental management: Is there an on-site letting programme through the resort, what does it charge, and what occupancy has it actually achieved?

Enquire about Lubana Island

UInvest Group works directly with developers across Oman, and we assess a project’s weak points as carefully as its strengths. On Lubana Island we can obtain current availability across the five remaining units, the built-up and plot areas of each in Omani riyals, the contractual completion date — which is the question this project most needs answered — the service-charge figure neither document publishes, the full payment schedule including the final instalment, and written confirmation of whether your specific unit reaches the Golden Residency threshold.

If freehold in Dhofar is the requirement, this and the wider Amazi district at Hawana Salalah are the credible answers, with the same developer’s Jebel Sifah community as the Muscat-side equivalent. If the timeline is the obstacle and you want something closer to ready, the comparison set runs to Taqah Long Beach Boutique and The Sea Front Residences along the coast — with the tenure caveats set out on each of those pages — or, in the capital, the move-in-ready Mandarin Oriental Residences and the established marina communities of Al Mouj and Barr Al Jissah.