Emaar Properties, the largest Arab developer by market value, said on Wednesday it would seek to sell properties at its first project in Canada to buyers in Dubai.

Emaar Canada, a unit of the Dubai-based developer involved in projects worth more than $100 billion in 18 countries, would market its Wills Creek residential project in South Surrey, British Columbia, in the Gulf emirate this week, it said in a statement.

’With the sale in Dubai, Emaar is offering a special opportunity for residents in the city to own a home in Canada,’ Emaar Canada managing director Robert Booth said.

Emaar was seeking to tap regional interest in career and educational opportunities in Canada, he said.

Dubai is witnessing an economic boom spurred by a more than six-fold rise in oil prices since 2002.

The number of millionaires in the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter grew by 15.3 per cent to 78,000 last year, according to a World Wealth Report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini last month.

Emaar owns John Laing Homes in the United States, where new home construction is sliding as the subprime mortgage crisis bites.

Vancouver, British Columbia, site of the 2010 Winter Olympics, is Canada’s most-expensive real estate market. Housing prices in British Columbia are coming down from red-hot growth earlier this year, Statistics Canada said this month.-Reuters