I sell real estate, and I think our industry has a problem. We spend too much time helping people buy and not enough time helping them decide whether they should buy at all.
Think about how most property transactions begin. A buyer contacts an agent. The first question is almost always the same. What is your budget? Then come the listings. Two million dirhams, here are five properties. One million dollars, here are ten houses.
That is backwards. Budget is the last thing that should be asked, not the first.
The questions that should come first
Before a single listing gets sent, an advisor should know the answer to these.
- Why are you buying? Income, capital appreciation, a family home, residency, diversification. These are five different products, not one.
- What is your holding period? A five year investment and a twenty year investment should not lead to the same building.
- Where does the money come from? Cash, mortgage, sale of another asset, or a payment plan you are relying on future income to service.
- What happens if you need to sell in year three? Everybody plans to hold. Life does not always agree.
Then comes the question our industry avoids.
Should you actually buy right now?
Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe the property is good but the price is not. Maybe you should negotiate. Maybe the secondary market offers better value than the developer. Maybe renting makes sense for another year. Maybe keeping the money in cash beats forcing a property purchase you were not ready to make.
And sometimes the answer should simply be: do not buy this property.
That should not be treated as a failure for an advisor. That is the job.
What we actually check in Dubai, with the numbers
Advice without evidence is just a stronger opinion. Here is what we look at before we tell somebody a Dubai purchase makes sense, and the real figures behind each one.
1. Future supply in the exact submarket
This is the single most ignored number in Dubai. Cushman and Wakefield Core put 2026 supply at roughly 49,700 units, of which about 20,400 had been delivered by mid August and around 29,300 were still to come this year. ValuStrat projects about 60,000 units in 2027 and roughly 322,000 units by 2030.
Set that against Dubai’s existing stock of about 900,000 homes. The pipeline to 2030 is equal to roughly a third of everything standing today. Around 80 percent of it is apartments.
That does not mean do not buy. It means the answer differs enormously by product. A villa community with no remaining land is a different bet from a tower in a district receiving several thousand more apartments within your holding period. Anyone selling you both with the same pitch has not done the work.
2. The rent line, which has already turned
Dubai residential rents fell 6.2 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2026 while average sale prices held slightly above 2025 levels. Rents down, prices steady, means yields compressed. If the case for buying was built on a rental figure from last year, the case has changed. We wrote that up in full in why Dubai rents are falling in 2026.
3. The service charge, in dirhams per square foot
We read the official project briefs for 58 developments and pulled the anticipated service charge wherever the developer published one. Across the 13 projects with a stated figure the range ran from AED 4 to AED 25 per square foot per year. That is a spread of more than six to one from a single developer, so location and building type are doing the work, not finish quality.
Run it on real units and it gets uncomfortable. A 7,610 square foot five bedroom villa at AED 4 costs about AED 30,400 a year to hold. A 1,642 square foot two bedroom apartment on Palm Jumeirah at AED 25 costs about AED 41,000. The villa is 4.6 times larger and 26 percent cheaper to hold. Full study here: what Dubai property actually costs to own.
Almost nobody asks for this number before signing. It is annual, it is for as long as you own, and it is frequently absent from the marketing entirely.
4. Developer premium against the secondary market
Off plan is sold on payment plans and launch pricing. Ready stock is sold on what somebody will actually pay today. Those are not the same market and the gap between them is the premium you are paying for time and for the plan. Sometimes it is worth it. Sometimes an equivalent completed unit two buildings away costs less and produces rent from month one.
5. Whether the payment plan actually adds up
When we extracted payment schedules from developer collateral across a dozen projects, several did not total 100 percent as published. Not because the developer is hiding anything, but because launch documents get abbreviated and the missing tranches sit in the SPA. If the schedule you were shown does not add to 100, you have not seen the whole plan yet. Ask for the rest before you commit, not after.
6. Exit liquidity
How many units are there in the building, how many of those will be investor owned, and how many are likely to hit the resale market at the same time you want out. A tower where 60 percent of buyers are investors on the same payment plan has a queue at the exit. A villa community with 90 percent owner occupiers does not.
The same buyer problem, a different market
We advise on both sides of this. Americans buying in Dubai, and Gulf investors buying in the United States. The worries are not the same.
| What we check in Dubai | What we check in the United States |
|---|---|
| Future supply in the submarket | Annual property tax, which never stops |
| Service charge per square foot | Insurance, and whether it is still obtainable |
| Developer premium versus secondary | HOA dues and any special assessment history |
| Payment plan completeness | Financing cost and rate exposure |
| Exit liquidity in the building | Physical condition and deferred maintenance |
| Chilled water billed separately | The true all in monthly cost of ownership |
A Gulf buyer looking at Los Angeles often focuses on the purchase price and misses that the annual carrying cost is a permanent tax line. An American buying in Dubai often celebrates the absence of property tax and misses that the service charge, the district cooling capacity charge and the 4 percent Dubai Land Department transfer fee are all real money.
The buyer’s actual question is identical in both places. How do I know I am making a good decision? More listings do not answer that. Better advice does.
When we say do not buy
These are not hypothetical. They are the situations where we tell somebody to walk away or wait.
- The plan needs a rent that no longer exists. If the yield only works at 2025 rent levels and rents have fallen, the plan is broken, not conservative.
- The holding period is shorter than the handover. Buying off plan with a three year horizon on a project completing in year three is not an investment, it is a coin toss on the resale market.
- The service charge has not been disclosed in writing. No figure, no purchase. Every number in a brochure is described as anticipated, never committed.
- The payment plan is servicing income that is not certain. A plan that only works if a bonus arrives is a liability with a view.
- Everything about the deal is the discount. When the entire pitch is the incentive rather than the asset, the asset is the problem.
- The buyer wants residency and nothing else. There are cheaper and cleaner routes to residency than an unsuitable apartment you will struggle to sell. Buy the visa route, not the wrong flat.
Questions answered
Should I buy property in Dubai right now? It depends entirely on why you are buying and how long you will hold. With roughly 49,700 units due in 2026 and around 60,000 in 2027, the answer varies sharply by community and by product type. Villa communities with no remaining land and towers in heavy delivery districts are not the same decision.
What should I ask a Dubai real estate agent before anything else? Ask what could go wrong with the specific unit, what the anticipated service charge is per square foot, how many comparable units complete in that community during your holding period, and what the same money buys in the secondary market. If the answers are vague, keep looking.
Is off plan better than ready property in Dubai? Neither is better. We compared them properly in off plan versus ready property in Dubai. Off plan trades cash flow for a payment plan and takes completion and market risk. Ready property costs more up front and produces rent immediately. The right answer depends on your holding period and how certain your income is.
Is Dubai oversupplied? The pipeline is large, roughly a third of existing stock by 2030, and population growth has so far absorbed delivery. Oversupply is not a citywide condition, it is a submarket condition. The number that matters is deliveries in your community during your holding period, not the emirate total.
Should a real estate advisor ever tell a client to buy nothing? Yes. If an advisor has never told a client not to buy, they are not advising, they are distributing listings. Ask any agent when they last talked somebody out of a purchase. The answer tells you a great deal.
Where I stand
Before we show somebody what they can buy, I want our industry to get much better at working out what they should not buy. The best relationship with a client might start with three words. Do not buy this.
If an advisor is never willing to say that, I would question whose interests they are really protecting.
Umer Shauket is Founder and CEO of Cresco Real Estate LLC, RERA ORN 34288. Supply figures from Cushman and Wakefield Core and ValuStrat as reported on 15 August 2026. Rent movement from CBRE’s second quarter 2026 UAE residential review. Service charge figures extracted from official developer project briefs by the Cresco research team. Published 17 August 2026. General information, not investment advice.