For journalists and analysts

How we count

Published Dubai market totals for the first half of 2026 range from AED 221 billion to AED 421 billion depending on who you read. Almost none of them say what is inside the number. The gap is not usually error, it is scope: sales only, or sales plus mortgages plus gifts; homes, or every building and plot. This page says exactly what ours contain.

What counts as a sale

The register records every transfer, not only purchases. Mortgages are registered against a property at the loan amount, which is not a price, and gifts are frequently registered at a nominal figure. Together they are roughly one registration in four. Dubai Marina in a recent twelve months had 2,185 sales, 1,190 mortgages and 708 gifts: a count that forgets this nearly doubles the market, and a median that forgets it is dragged toward loan sizes.

So a “sale” here means the register’s own grouping, transaction_group = sales, which covers sell, pre-registration sell, delayed sell, sale on payment plan and development registration. Mortgages and gifts are excluded from every sales figure we publish. Where we report them, they are labelled as what they are.

What counts as a home

Land, whole buildings, offices, shops, showrooms and hotel units are real markets with real prices. They are not the market a person asking about apartment prices means, and mixing them in produces nonsense: land alone is about one registered sale in eleven, and a single plot can land in a community’s figures as an eight-figure “home”. Every home figure on this site excludes them.

The exception is stated rather than hidden: a handful of districts on the register sell nothing but land, so on those pages the land sales are the market and the page says so in those words rather than reporting zero.

Rents

Rent figures come from registered Ejari tenancy contracts, which is what tenants signed rather than what was advertised. A third of every tenancy registered in Dubai is commercial, and mixing offices into a residential median is the single easiest way to publish a wrong rent: Business Bay’s registered contracts are mostly offices at a median around a quarter of what a flat there costs. Residential only, and labour accommodation excluded, because a bed space filed as a lease is not a home somebody is choosing between.

Rents are registered as an annual amount, so every rent figure here is per year. Bedroom counts come from the register’s own sub-type wording. We do not publish a median from fewer than thirty contracts; the cell is left blank instead of estimated.

The broker register

Our broker count is every individual listed in the Land Department’s own licensed broker directory whose licence expiry has not passed, as at the date below. Other publications quote lower figures; the difference is definitional rather than factual, and we state ours so it can be checked.

The transaction count against a broker number is the Department’s own figure and comes with no breakdown of any kind: the endpoint returns a single count, so it may contain both sales and leases and we cannot separate them. We say so wherever it appears. We never publish a zero against a named person, because the register attributes transactions to a broker number only in some cases and an absence is not an achievement gap.

Nominal transfers

The register carries genuine sale rows at token values: share transfers, corrections and transfers between family members. Princess Tower has a two-bedroom at AED 40,505 and a one-bedroom at AED 163. A median absorbs a handful of these; a list of recent sales does not, so wherever individual transactions are shown we drop anything below 40% of that building’s own median price per square foot. That removes token transfers, which sit at a few percent of median, and keeps any genuinely distressed sale.

As at

Counted live when this page was built, not typed in. The register itself records nothing on Fridays and Saturdays, so a figure that looks two days behind at a weekend is current.

What we will not do

• We do not estimate. Where the record is silent the page says so rather than modelling a number.
• We do not sell property and take no developer commissions, so no figure here has a deal behind it.
• We do not publish a median from a sample too small to carry one.
• We do not forecast. Where we quote somebody else’s projection it is labelled as theirs.