The Cresco Track Record: Dubai Transactions, Named and Dated

Every brokerage in Dubai quotes a transaction figure. Almost none of them will tell you which deals it is made of. This page does the opposite. It lists individual transactions with the attributes that make them checkable: the month, the community, the developer, the side we acted for, and the value. Buyer and seller identities are never published, because that is client information and RERA treats it as such. Everything else is here.

The list is short on purpose. An entry only appears once the contract value has been confirmed against our own file. Deals we cannot evidence to that standard are not listed, even when they were ours.

Registered transactions

March 2024 · Harrisoni La Mer, La Mer South, Jumeirah 1

Why AED 90 million is an unusual number in Dubai

Dubai registers a very large number of transactions and a very small number of large ones. Across a recent seven week window we sampled from the Dubai Land Department register, 30 June to 18 August 2026, the emirate recorded 21,424 sales worth AED 51.1 billion. Of those, 24 cleared AED 90 million. That is the top 0.11 per cent, roughly the twenty fifth largest transaction in Dubai over seven weeks.

Narrow it to off plan, which is what this deal was, and it gets rarer. Of 14,853 off plan sales in the same window, two were at AED 90 million or above.

Narrow it to villas and the number goes to zero. Not one villa anywhere in Dubai, off plan or ready, cleared even AED 40 million in those seven weeks. The largest villa sale in the emirate over the period was AED 31 million.

That window is 2026 and this transaction registered in March 2024, so treat it as an illustration of scale rather than a like for like comparison. The point holds either way. A nine figure villa is rarer in Dubai than a nine figure anything else, because at that level the market trades land and towers, not houses.

The price band, from our own register data

On the rolling twelve months of Dubai Land Department registered sales at or above AED 10 million, Jumeirah villas record 27 sales at an average of AED 72.55 million, or AED 4,701 per square foot. That is the highest average villa price of any community we track. Palm Jumeirah villas average AED 52.63 million across 109 sales. An average of AED 72.55 million across only 27 sales means the top of that set sits well into nine figures.

In other words this transaction is not an outlier claim. It sits inside a band our own luxury market page already publishes and updates automatically.

What we are not claiming

After handover, Almal marketed remaining completed villas in the same project at AED 110 million. The developer announced completion of the first residential unit in November 2024 and described a limited number of finished villas as available.

That AED 110 million is an asking price, not a registered resale. We are not presenting it as a gain, a valuation or a return, and nobody should read it as one. We publish it because it is a public figure from the developer and because leaving it out would be its own kind of editing. The honest description is that a client contracted off plan at AED 90 million and the developer later asked AED 110 million for finished stock in the same scheme. What that unit would actually fetch on a resale today is a question only the register can answer, and it has not been asked yet.

This is the same rule we apply everywhere on this site. We divide registered rent by registered ready sale prices and never by an off plan launch price. We print the three month window even when it disagrees with the twelve month one. Applying that rule costs us the more flattering version of this story, which is precisely why it is worth applying.

How to check any of this

The project, the developer and the AED 110 million figure are public and were reported in the trade press. The transaction itself sits in the Dubai Land Department register for March 2024 under La Mer South, Jumeirah 1. Any party with a legitimate interest, a buyer, a lender, a journalist or a regulator, can request confirmation from us directly and we will provide what we are permitted to provide.

If a figure on this page is ever wrong we would rather you told us than assumed we knew.

Contracted sales, registration not yet filed

October 2025 · Blossom 76, Jumeirah Village Circle

The number worth noting here is not the twenty two units. It is the eighty per cent. Cresco was appointed exclusive agent for the whole tower and has placed four fifths of it, almost entirely one unit at a time to individual buyers. The twenty two unit block below is the only bulk transaction inside that total.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. Clearing a building through one institutional buyer is a single negotiation. Clearing it unit by unit means finding and closing scores of separate purchasers, which is the harder thing and the one that tells a developer whether an agent can actually distribute.

We acted on both sides of this transaction. We were appointed by the developer under an exclusive mandate and the buyer was an existing Cresco client. Double ended deals are common in Dubai and there is nothing improper about them, but a reader is entitled to know when a broker sits on both sides rather than work it out later.

Why there is no price on this entry. The buyer is holding these units and intends to resell. Publishing what they paid would sit in front of every future negotiation they enter, and that is their commercial position to protect rather than ours to spend. So we publish nothing rather than publish a number that flatters the deal. If we cannot show a figure we can stand behind, we show none.

Developer mandates and volume placed

The entries above are individual transactions. This section is different. It records inventory placed for developers over time, unit by unit, which is a separate kind of work and the one developers weigh when deciding who gets the next building.

Why these are counted separately from the transactions above. Neither line is one deal. Each is the total of many separate sales made under a developer appointment, and we do not present them as transactions because they are not. Anyone reading a figure like 71 units is entitled to know whether it was one signature or seventy one, and here it was seventy one.

On the Lamborghini mandate specifically, we held no exclusive. Cresco was one of several brokerages appointed to the project and placed 71 units in open competition with all of them. We were also among the first firms to take Gulf Land on, before the developer was widely represented. Both facts are worth stating rather than hiding behind the number. An exclusive hands an agent a captive pipeline. Placing volume without one measures something else entirely, and it is the thing we would rather be judged on.

Further transactions will be added to this page as each contract value is confirmed. We would rather publish four deals we can evidence than four hundred we cannot.

This record was built under Umer Shauket, founder and chief executive of Cresco Real Estate.