Dubai Real Estate Market Update

This page is not a monthly report. It is a live view of the Dubai Land Department register. Every number below is rendered from registered transactions at the moment you load it, which means it cannot go stale the way a dated market update does.

Data verified 28 August 2026. Dubai Land Department registered transactions via Bayut TruView, rolling 12 months to August 2026.

It currently covers 474,498 registered rental contracts across 35 apartment communities, plus 22,858 villa contracts across 12 villa communities. Coverage expands nightly.

Why this page replaced our dated market updates

We used to publish a market update every month or two. Each one was accurate on the day it went out and slowly became wrong afterwards. A reader arriving nine months later had no way of knowing which parts still held.

That is a structural problem, not a diligence problem. So we stopped writing snapshots and built this instead. The numbers live in a database, this page renders them, and scheduled jobs refresh the database. If we ever stop maintaining it, the stamp above starts warning you rather than quietly lying.

What renters are actually paying

Registered rental contracts, by community, over a rolling twelve months. This is what tenants signed, not what landlords advertised.

Read the rent per sqft column against the average rent column. A community can show a high average simply because its apartments are larger.

The number most Dubai commentary is missing

Every community above is positive on the twelve month view. That is the number the market quotes and it is technically true.

Now look at the shorter window.

Three honest caveats before you act on this. Summer seasonality sits inside the three month number and Dubai always softens over the summer. Smaller windows mean smaller samples, so a single large building handing over can move a community. A falling average can be a change in unit mix rather than a fall in price, if more studios transacted this quarter than last.

We publish it anyway, because the alternative is quoting only the number that flatters the market.

Gross yields on ready stock

Registered rent divided by ready sale price, both per square foot. The sale side excludes off plan deliberately. You cannot rent an apartment that has not been built, so putting a launch price into a yield calculation produces a number that cannot happen.

That single filter moves Dubai yields by one to two full points, which is why our figures differ from most published elsewhere.

Price per square foot

The villa market

Villa communities register far fewer transactions than apartment communities, so a single quarter tells you very little. Plot sizes also vary enormously inside the same community, which makes the per square foot column more useful here than the average.

Compare those to the apartment yields above. Villas run materially lower. A villa buys you space, a garden and a different kind of tenant. It does not buy you the best yield in Dubai, and any broker telling you otherwise is quoting an asking rent against an off plan price.

The luxury bracket

Luxury on this site means a single thing. A home that changed hands at AED 10,000,000 or more, registered with the Dubai Land Department. Not an asking price. Not an adjective.

3,183 sales cleared that floor in the last twelve months across 27 communities.

How to use this page

If you are renting, find your community in the first table and check what was actually registered for your bedroom count. That is your negotiating position, and it is a matter of public record rather than opinion.

If you are buying to let, start with the yield table rather than the rent table. A high rent in a community with high prices is not a good investment, it is an expensive one.

If you are selling, the momentum table tells you whether your community is still rising or has already turned. Those two situations call for very different pricing.

If you are watching the market, the momentum table is the most useful thing here. It is the difference between the story the market tells about itself and what the register says.

Method, and what we exclude

All figures come from Dubai Land Department registered transactions over a rolling twelve month window, grouped by community, property type and bedroom count.

Sale prices are ready stock only. Off plan is excluded from yield calculations for the reason given above.

We suppress any cell built on too few contracts rather than print a number we do not trust. In several older communities the DLD record carries no bedroom attribute, so a bedroom filter returns a handful of contracts out of thousands. We leave those out instead of presenting them as the market.

We also check for a specific failure. If a community page returns identical values with and without a bedroom filter, that means the request redirected and the filter was silently dropped. Those communities are excluded until the source is fixed. It is a real failure mode and we test for it on every refresh.

Go deeper

Average rent in Dubai by area and bedroom is the full rent analysis with the reasoning behind these tables.

Villa rent and villa prices by community covers the villa market by bedroom count with yields.

Luxury property in Dubai, AED 10 million and above lists every community transacting in the eight figure bracket.

The rental yield calculator lets you run these numbers against a specific size and price, pre filled from the same register.

Ask us about a specific building

Community averages are the start of the work, not the end of it. Two towers on the same street can differ by twenty percent on service charge alone, and that lands entirely on your net yield.

Send us a building and we will send you back what actually transacted in it. Cresco Real Estate is RERA registered in Dubai, ORN 34288.